Drought, with a Side of Pig

I went out to the Bamberger Ranch Preserve on August 19th to do some work on David Bamberger's computer, see David, and take in the sights. David's computer was doing fine, but David and the sights weren't doing well at all. David was/is being tortured by a case of shingles, and the land is suffering severely from our drought. Allow me to demonstrate that last point visually:

Above is what ranchers call a "tank", a water storage area, frequently artificially constructed or enhanced, intended to provide livestock with access to water. This one is artificial and constructed at the head of a valley. I shot the photo while standing on the right end of the earthen dam that should be retaining the tank's water. You can see a straight line depression in the earth running from the lower center of the picture to the right and down; that's the spillway for handling overflows. This tank, at its deepest, is maybe six feet deep when full, but is generally of a shallow and broad character. When it's raining, the tank is fed by runoff from the plateau above and the surrounding valley walls. The rest of the time it's fed by a spring. At this point, however, it's no longer fed by anything at all. Normal rains haven't come for more than two years, so there's no runoff, and no recharge of the aquifer that feeds the spring. If you didn't know it was a tank, it'd be easy to mistake it for just another area of dusty, sunburned land.

Indeed, the landscape was so transformed that it wasn't until I reached that tank, that I realized I wasn't even in the valley I thought I was in. The last time I'd visited this particular valley was in April of 2007, when its entrance was a sedge meadow, with a steady trickle of water running through the middle of it, as seen below, in a subsection of a panorama. Needless to say, it looked nothing like that during my latest visit, though it didn't occur to me at the time to take a picture of what it did look like, unfortunately.

But that was a small valley. Its neighbor is much larger, which means much larger runoff and recharge zones, a better spring, and a tank many times the size of its neighbor. I was amazed to find that it still held water, but it had very little, and what there was of it looked thick and of a poisonously orange color. It was supporting a group of turtles, but I don't imagine that there was much else left alive in it.

To fully appreciate the effects of the drought on the state of that tank and the surrounding land, it helps to see it under good conditions. Because I've been photographing that valley for years, I happen to have a shot of that tank (a portion of a heretofore unreleased panorama) in my files. So, below is the same tank, seen from about twenty feet to the right, on April 21, 2007, a year when the normal rains did come, if only during the spring. The tank isn't full (the water level is well below the spillway on the right), but it's in good shape and the land is downright verdant by comparison to its current state.

This is a hint of what the central Texas hill country can look like, if the land is well managed, and our yearly ≅30 inches of rain falls. It's a fair first approximation, to this Texan's eyes, of paradise. But, as I said, it's only a hint because, if memory serves, we'd had about nine years of sub-normal rains prior to the fall of 2006 and the spring of 2007, and the rains went back to sub-normal shortly after that spring.

My recent visit to that parched tank did bring one pleasant(-ish) surprise, however: an encounter with a feral pig. (At first I thought it was a javelina, which would have been truly pleasant, but, not having seen a javelina in around thirty years, my memory of their appearance turned-out to be in sad shape.) Due to the drought, she was very lean, and the six piglets with her were still quite small. The piglets stuck to the shadows under nearby brush, while mom and I stood there for some time in the punishing afternoon sun. When she finally turned to take a good look at me, she soon trotted away, up a trail, with the piglets in tow.

Below, by way of comparison, are a few members of a feral pig clan that I encountered in the ranch's Sun Valley, near sunset, during the lush spring of 2007. There was nothing lean about them.

  
  

The feral pigs are a problem, unfortunately, not only because they are an introduced species, but because they engage in damaging behavior including: the creation of wallows; the destruction of ground nesting species such as turkey, quail, rabbits, and others – even deer fawns; they damage fences; and on rare occasions they will go so far as to attack people. They are also likely to be competing with the increasingly scarce (and still actively hunted) native javelinas for habitat. However, on that April evening, in that valley, with plump piglets happily chasing one another through deep grass, and the adults contentedly rooting around, the scene was rather idyllic.

Grandpa Johnson, the Inventor of Fat-Free Bacon

Bacon lovers in the audience may find the title too good to be true, but fat-free bacon was invented, and it was my grandpa who did it.

I've never found a good excuse for telling this story in writing (though my good friend Jay Lake's occasional bacon references have tempted me), and, as you'll find out soon enough, it deserves a better story teller than I, but since nobody else is ever likely to record these facts, the duty seems to fall to me.

My Grandpa Johnson died when I was three, so I was told, and thus memory provides me not a single recollection of him. But I remember being told at least two things about him. The first was that he wrote a book, and one that was published, no less. Even as a kid that amazed me and made him stand-out from all the other members of my family as the only person who'd ever done anything that really mattered. I mean, a book. He wrote one. Someone published it. He added something very concrete to the sum of human knowledge, for it was a volume of facts, rather than fiction. That has never ceased to impress me. (Had it been fiction, I'd still have been impressed that he'd added something concrete to human culture, but then the rest of this story probably never would have happened.)

The book was Animals in the American Economy by John A. Sims & Leslie E. Johnson. (ISBN 0813802458.) I was told as a kid that the co-author was the man who'd finished the book after grandpa had unexpectedly dropped dead. So, if there was ever a promotional tour, sadly, grandpa missed it, along with any chance of a shot at the best seller list. I am assured that life is not fair, albeit usually by the people who are making it unfair, but this must surely constitute some independent proof of that assertion.

The second thing I was told about Grandpa Johnson was that he'd inventend fat-free bacon.

If it should seem surprising that he, of all the grandpas that the world has ever created, should choose that particular book to write, or that he should be the one to set out to create fat-free bacon, it may be helpful to know that he was Head of Animal Husbandry at South Dakota State College, and, ultimately, Head of the Department of Animal Husbandry at Iowa State College. Because of his latter affiliation, I was dumbstruck many years ago when I searched for him on the Internet and found that he had a web page – dead for 25 years when the Web was invented, but he still had a web page. Neat trick. For a man who could pull that off, presumably a book was no problem. Fat-free bacon was another story, however.

The invention of fat-free bacon was handed-down in family legend, and if the legend was ever rich in detail, those details didn't manage to penetrate my young skull. Nonetheless, I choose to believe in the invention, (1) because it's a good story, and (2) because his resumé says he was just the man for the job. Which is to say that he was a man with both the means and the inclination to breed swine. And none of that "let's just mate a few pigs to get a few more" sort of swine breeding, but controlled breeding, with the resources of a state college at his disposal. Which state college that was, will have to remain a matter for historians.

Historians aside, I was assured by family legend that grandpa bred generation after generation of swine in his determined quest for the culinary holy grail of fat-free bacon. And after years of breeding just the right sow and whatever-they-call-a-male-pig, his program of old-school genetic engineering was at last a success. He had one of the resulting pigs slaughtered and the hog belly cured. Once that was done, he presumably went home proudly to present the slab of bacon to his good wife for cutting and cooking. The family gathered—surely this is the sort of thing for which families cannot help but gather—and, I imagine, sat anxiously around the dinner table listening to it cook, and hungering for the first taste of the bacon to which human civilization had been leading. Soon, I expect, a plate of the sizzling miracle meat was placed before them on the dinner table and quickly portioned-out to everyone.

And that's pretty much where this combination of speculation and family legend ends. For, by all accounts, the bacon was terrible; unpleasantly dry for a start, and I recall nothing good being said about the flavor.*

A technical success, but a practical failure, the bacon project was abandoned there and then, I was told. And so it was that that thread in the weave of the 13,000 year history of the pig was abruptly cut, and its dangling end vanished into the mists of time. Until now.

Know ye, History, that Leslie Eckroat Johnson invented fat-free bacon, and tremble.

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* How this bacon differed from back bacon, which is naturally relatively low in fat, yet tasty, I do not know. Perhaps it was the difference between being "low in fat" and truly "fat free" that was crucial.

Geminids and Mysteries Revisited

When you have an old house with a mail slot, rather than a mailbox, you don't have to pay any attention to your mail until the drifts begin to block access to the front door, or until someone shuts off your utilities. Hoping to head-off the latter, this evening I began one of my occasional excavations. Deposited here and there in the accumulated strata of junk mail were the dreaded bills, but also a few unexpected gems in the form of holiday cards, obsolete now, some would say, but I prefer to think of them as aged to perfection.

Significantly, one was from Margaret & David Bamberger. In it, Margaret said she'd read my blog post "Geminids and Mysteries" and "[...] when I read about your mystery critter I had to laugh because when we were camping one time a similar thing happened. After being awake for a while wondering if I should hide in the truck because I couldn't imagine what was out there, I finally figured out that a bunch of feral pigs were hanging out doing god knows what."

That's the best identification of my mystery critters suggested so far, and I'm inclined to accept it. So, now I know. Probably.