The church picnic season in Fayette County, Texas, with its auctions, stew dinners, polka masses, is winding down, and so, praise be to God, is the Texas summer.

Yesterday was the annual St. Mary’s picnic at High Hill, a place some call a “ghost town.”

The railroad once planned to make it a stop on the route between Houston and Austin, but citizens declined, so the tracks (and later, Interstate 10) ran through Schulenburg instead, a few miles to the south. High Hill maintained its topographical prominence, pride, and the fine old Catholic church, but its population dwindled.

Yesterday’s church picnic drew many thousands of people back, though, in celebration of St. Mary’s 150th anniversary. Some might say that the High Hillfolk were short-sighted to refuse the railroad’s offer, but they were indeed wise to schedule their annual picnic for the Sunday before Labor Day. The worst of summer is typically over: this year the air was fresh and the temperatures quite merciful – in the low 90s.

Snow on the prairie (Euphorbia bicolor) at High Hill, TX, 9/5/10
Photo: Human Flower Project

And all across central Fayette County, Euphorbia bicolor was blooming. There were whole fields of it, giving credence to its name “Snow on the Prairie.” (It turns out High Hill was earlier known as Blum Hill; could Euphoria bicolor have been why?).

A “snowy” field of late summer, between High Hill and Hostyn
Fayette County, Texas, September 5, 2010
Photo: Human Flower Project

Up at St. Mary’s there were two tours Sunday afternoon describing the extensive restoration of this “painted church,” all of the work completed in the past 8 months. (Our garage rehab is now 10 months in the making and far from the finish line.)  A new cookbook has been published to honor the parish’s sesquicentennial, and someone had made a giant metal gate featuring the silhouette of the church, offering it to the benefit auction. Meanwhile, the fabulous Mark Halata and Texavia brought the crowd to its feet with four hours of polkas and waltzes.

Mark Halata and Texavia play for the 150th anniversary of St. Mary’s Church, High Hill
Photo: Bill Bishop

Fatima has its whirling sun. At High Hill, there’s snow on Labor Day and ghosts who dance and put up pickles.

“The thing’s as concrete there as a bird in a cage, a bait on a hook, a piece of cheese in a mouse-trap.”

So insists novelist Hugh Vereker about the great and delicious “secret” that runs through all his writings. He’s egging on a small-time literary critic, the unnamed narrator in Henry James’s story The Figure in the Carpet, dropping psychic crumbs that will keep his ambitious young admirer reading, studying, yearning to crack the artist’s code.

We read James’s intriguing novella today, egged on ourselves by some queasily strident photographs of carpets in Las Vegas casinos. They were taken by Swedish photographer Chris Maluszynski and featured earlier this year by both the Daily Mail and, most recently, Wired. Both articles quote Dave Schwartz, a scholar based at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who’s studied the psychology of casino décor: odorants, floor plans, the cushions on stools, and timbre of slot machine bells. Schwartz says, “Casino carpet is known as an exercise in deliberate bad taste that somehow encourages people to gamble.”

What’s taste have to do with it? Presumably, taste is an exercise of judgment and discernment, while gambling—the compulsive sort that keeps people up all night, and the next night, standing at the roulette wheel – requires that something override judgment, even disrupting such basic survival mechanisms as appetite and fatigue.

Country folks and city folks meet every sweltering August at the Kentucky State Fair in Louisville for corn dogs, horse shows, games of chance, beekeepers and bumper cars.  You can count on donkeys and the Oak Ridge Boys each year, too. The fair just wouldn’t be the same without big Asses and Elvira. 

Notions of healthy Kentucky grown produce – and there is plenty around in local farm markets - are pushed aside for ten days of corn dogs, snow cones, funnel cakes and elephant ears. (A delicious beef brisket barbeque was the closest thing to Pritikin I could find.)  The atherosclerotic-inducing donut bacon cheeseburger was this year’s sensation. Add an order of chili cheese fries and you could clog the next oil spill. (You wonder why, in all of “Fast Food Nation,” no one ever came-up with a donut bacon cheeseburger before, and then you’re reminded that it took 5,000 years for someone to put wheels on a suitcase.)

There’s flying under the radar. There’s also flying over the radar – a mode of transportation accessible to a select class of travelers. Ex-U.S.-presidents qualify if, like Jimmy Carter, they’re internationally known human rights advocates who have won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, flew to Pyongyang, North Korea, August 25. Their trip was ostensibly to secure the release of a U.S. citizen, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, who had been sentenced to eight years of hard labor for entering the country illegally. That was the Carters’ official purpose. But such a high-profile visit suggests lots more diplomatic knitting: to gain North Korea’s cooperation in nuclear disarmament? to begin normalizing relations with the U.S.? to ease somehow the animosity between the two Koreas since the sinking of a S. Korean ship in March? Who knows? That’s what flying over the radar is all about.

The New York Times reported,  “Gomes is believed to have entered North Korea in support of Robert Park, a fellow Christian activist from the United States, who crossed into the country from China in December to call on [N. Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il] to release all political prisoners. Mr. Park was expelled after some 40 days.”

But Gomes remained in custody and, according to several sources, had attempted suicide since his incarceration in April.

Carter made the trip as a “private citizen” rather than a U.S. official, opening the way for many friendly gestures that would not at present be possible for the Obama Administration. (Even so, South Korean leaders were said to be incensed at the visit).

Ceremonial flowers appeared throughout the Carters’ short stay, maintaining an air of kind formality. Upon his arrival in Pyongyang, the ex-president was welcomed by a young girl, who handed him a bouquet and extended a vivacious salute. Baring his signature smile, he accepted the flowers and “blew her a kiss before getting into a black stretch Mercedes-Benz.”

By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary
EarthScholars™ Research Group

The earth’s vegetation is part of a web of life in which there are intimate and essential relations between plants and the Earth, between plants and other plants, between plants and animals.—Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Wilderness areas provide plant enthusiasts – and anyone else with eyes to see and a mind to wonder— with occupations for a lifetime. In the wild, we may witness, explore, photograph, and write about the natural beauty of plants, their botanical diversity, visual complexity, fascinating life cycles, and valuable ecological roles—all within the thought-provoking and memorable settings of adventure and solitude. Encounters with nature and wilderness can reawaken our sense of awe and fascination. Such experiences help recalibrate our inflated estimates of 21st-century humans’ importance and degree of control over nature.

Many thanks to Nona Ferdon for filling in some of the gaps in our story of flowers in the history-making March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965. We noted that several of the Civil Rights marchers, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wore leis.

“You wondered how they got there,” Nona writes of the floral garlands. “We took them. There were five of us representing Hawaii on the march.“

In our earlier story we had credited the pastor of Honolulu’s Kawaiahao Church, Rev. Abraham Akaka, who had befriended Dr. King the previous year, with sending the leis. He, in fact, may have been behind this effort in some way, but Nona, who delivered the flowers, doesn’t recall ever meeting Rev. Akaka or hearing of his involvement in this gesture. “I don’t know who organized on the leis,” she writes. “It was all on short notice and we showed up at the airport around 5 in the afternoon. There was no publicity or anything like that, we just said goodbye to some friends and left.  Taking leis was just something that anyone from Hawaii would do almost automatically.” Only after the march, when the leis had made their glorious statement, did the flowers inspire curiosity. Floral garlands around the neck weren’t, and still aren’t, a common sight in the Deep South.

By Allen Bush

My friend Mike Hayman phoned the day after “The Decision” —the LeBron James’s televised public relations disaster. LeBron and his handlers had spent the previous two weeks shopping pro basketball teams for a winning deal. Now Hayman wanted my decision. Did I want to patent Cercis candadenis ‘Alley Cat’: a variegated redbud that popped-up as a chance seedling in my back garden down near the alley?  (Unless Tinker Bell sprinkled pixie dust, I can only guess that seed must have blown in on the fair winds to my little spit of land.)

“Are we talking LeBron money?” I asked Hayman. Could this be my ticket to fortune? I wondered. Mike laughed: “No, this looks like the amateur ranks.” (At least he didn’t say Bush League!)