{"id":2313,"date":"2011-01-14T23:05:18","date_gmt":"2011-01-15T03:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/\/?p=2313"},"modified":"2011-06-20T15:34:28","modified_gmt":"2011-06-20T19:34:28","slug":"texas-ranging-05-the-permian-basin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/blog\/2011\/01\/14\/texas-ranging-05-the-permian-basin\/","title":{"rendered":"Texas Ranging 05. The Permian Basin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jan 12. Sea change coming north to Midland. The land flattens, and if you aren\u2019t careful you\u2019ll say it all looks the same, and empty. Yellow grass. Blue sky. Black mesquite trees (shrub-sized)\u00a0 that look charred against the grasses. All these dinosaurs of equipment lying around too. And corrugated metal sheds. Midland is all business. Until sunset, when you bathe in the light of West Texas, whatever your circumstance.<\/p>\n

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The Permian Basin is 250 million yrs old, and underlies the later formation of the Southern High Plains — the Llano Estacado. It\u2019s a tilting plateau that is well demarcated by escarpments and a river, and blurring on the southeast end into the next ecosystem of the Edwards Plateau. It\u2019s short grass prairie, high altitude. And in between the oil and the top soil is the Oglalla Aquifer, the largest body of underground water on the continent. The Permian basins were formed and then filled in as the huge inland sea dried out, along with the mass extinction was a lot of salt amid the critters we now use as oil. Below\/above. It\u2019s a delicate place, a place in between a lot of other places and subject to extreme changes in weather, surface water, and fortunes seem to play much the same way,\u00a0 made and broken (the dust bowl, droughts, oil booms and busts).
\nI\u2019m trying to pay attention to the tensions here –\u00a0 oil\/water\/land, permeable\/solid, brief time\/deep time.<\/p>\n

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Burr Williams called the Llano one vast ecotone <\/a>. In my estimation, that\u2019s as interesting as a mesocosm<\/a>. Burr Williams is the director of Sibley Nature Center<\/a>, dedicated to all things Llano Estacado, training an army of local citizen naturalists, exemplary in the deep study of a very site-specific ecosystem, and by extension, a model at understanding networks, and the networks of networks that make up the world we are enmeshed in. The Center is a dream, full of books, exhibits, and loads of taxidermy, it\u2019s at once polished and handmade, exceptions are the rule. Its idiosyncrasies make it magical. I think Burr\u2019s collection of Day of the Dead sculptures is as telling as the beehive installed behind glass embedded\u00a0 in the wall, or the fecund library.\u00a0 I get the feeling Burr is as enthused by a new niche created by sewage effluvient as an ancient fossil, an unspoiled salina. Nature abhors a vacuum<\/em>, he said. Sibley\u2019s teaching program about the Llano is years-long, and includes cultures, history, and interferences as well as things we think of as natural or native.
\nHere are a few examples of writings from Sibley Nature Center:
\nThe Texon Scar<\/a>
\nThe Ecology of Oil Well Pads<\/a>
\nBehaviors of Animals in Our Area<\/a><\/p>\n

\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/22155573@N00\/5353109399\/in\/set-72157625818763404\/\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Painting of bison and prairie dogs by Michael Nickells<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Monahans Sand Hills Park. I went on the way into Odessa. The park is a tiny gem, and in winter, empty of all but two long-term caravaners with lapdogs in jackets. It has a very Richard Misrach desert vibe<\/a>.\u00a0 Within the larger Llano, there are these micropockets of sand dunes, aided by tenacious plants that hold much of them together while the nude bits of silky fine sand are moving forms,\u00a0 alive with birds, and abundant animal tracks. I loved how the blackbirds were running the camping area.\u00a0\u00a0 There\u2019s oil in them thar sands, too.<\/p>\n

bird life
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\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/22155573@N00\/5351183390\/in\/set-72157625811887324\/\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Jan 13. A large circle was driven from Midland to Kermit to Wink to Wickett and back through Monahans at Golden Hour. $25 dollars in gas. It\u2019s far more efficient to stay home, but then you continue to think you know what you\u2019re talking about.<\/p>\n

2 panoramas from the sand hills:
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more pics at flickr<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jan 12. Sea change coming north to Midland. The land flattens, and if you aren\u2019t careful you\u2019ll say it all looks the same, and empty. Yellow grass. Blue sky. Black mesquite trees (shrub-sized)\u00a0 that look charred against the grasses. All these dinosaurs of equipment lying around too. And corrugated metal sheds. Midland is all business. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Texas Ranging 05. The Permian Basin”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[44,48],"tags":[45],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2313"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2313"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2492,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2313\/revisions\/2492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/o-matic.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}