Austin360 blogs > Out & About > Archives > 2011 > August > 24 > Entry
Austin’s perceptual geography
At almost every social assembly this summer, Topics No. 1 and 2 have been the heat and the drought. If the gathering was politically minded, the subject then turned to climate change, water conservation or treatment plants.
As a starting point for those conversations, we usually attempted to share a “perceptual geography,” a sense of Austin’s place on Earth.
We believed, somewhere in our heat-addled brains, that the offending high pressure ridge would eventually shift, or a tropical storm would roar in from the Gulf of Mexico. After all, relief had from come those directions before.
Before you accuse us of murder most foul, the trees are hanging in there, thanks to short, twice-weekly soaks, which will be reduced to once-weekly transfusions soon, as per City of Austin directive.
The sumacs are thriving; their blooms attract swarms of bees. The laurels are producing fat seed pods. Two of the spindly live oaks, however, looked really stressed, as do the persimmon, possumhaw, Eve’s necklace and, especially, two Eastern red cedars.
Skewed perceptual geography has always plagued our state’s newcomers and even old-timers. The Midwesterners who arrived in West Texas during a wet spell in the early1880s — soon after the transcontinental railways punched through the former Comancheria and the State of Texas opened school lands to settlers — thought they had arrived in another Kansas or Nebraska.
When, to their surprise, an inevitable dry cycle returned, they abandoned vast fields of withered wheat and corn and left behind dozens of ghosts towns.
Conversely, when I moved to Austin from flat, waterlogged Houston in the summer of 1984, the creekbeds were baked bone-dry and grass burned to a nasty gray-brown. That winter, we received three significant snows. I thus concluded that Austin existed on some sort of high desert, tyically arid and sometimes snowy cold.
Wrong. A classic mistake of perceptual geography, a newcomer’s conflation of weather with climate.
Unconsciously, though, I carried that misperception, in 1991, to an East Austin bungalow, where we shared a bounteous garden with landlords Sterling Price-McKinney and Lorne Loganbill. While I planted yuccas and succulants for my imaginary high desert, they, coming from the Midwest, planted bananas and fan palms.
It appeared these immigrants from Kansas and the Texas Panhandle thought they had landed in the tropics. The later-named Eponymous Garden on Garden Street survived and thrived, despite the introductions from two geographical imaginations.
We were not wrong, as Austinites, to get confused about our geography. Some of us live atop the rocky, semi-arid Hill Country, others at the southern base of the vast Great Plains. Still others perch on a detached extension of the Southern forests, or the nothernmost edges of coastal plains that drift all the way to the Yucatan.
As we return, socially, to Topics Nos. 1 and 2, let’s continue to adjust our shifting perceptual geography, through words and deeds.
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By Terri Givens
August 24, 2011 6:14 PM | Link to this
My husband and I have often commented this summer on the fact that we arrived during a rather wet and stormy summer 8 years ago. Our perceptions was that we were in a place that got a lot of rain all at once. When we hit our first drought, I struggled to grow flowers in my garden, then gave up and focused on native plants. Now I'm thinking about zeriscaping and switching to all succulents!