Dac Crossley's Western Blog

The Stars At Night

The month of August approaches, and those of us living in humid Georgia will have an opportunity to see once again the lights of the heavens. August is a dry month here. High pressure weather systems clear the air. Most of the year a combination of clouds, street lights and the glare from the city keeps the stars hidden from us.

Not so when I was a child in south Texas, living on the rim of the Wild Horse Desert with its clear atmosphere. Our little house (“Four rooms held together by a chimney,” said my father) had a back porch where we all slept. I watched the play of the constellations through the seasons, the milky way, shooting stars, an occasional comet. I would have become an astronomer but – alas! – I am no mathematician.

Our grandparent’s generation knew well those heavenly lanterns. The seasons were delineated by the stars. Sirius the dog star rising with the sun; that marks Dog Days. The Square of Perseus appearing in the east at twilight – Fall is on the way. Camping on the Oregon Trail? Set your wagon tongue toward Polaris, the North Star.

The northern skies were my grandmother Baird’s territory. She showed me Perseus and the demon star. Cassiopeia (“the broken-back chair”) circling opposite Ursa Major (“the wain,” an Elizabethan term).

My grandmother Crossley pointed south, to the archer Sagittarius (“the teapot”) and my favorite, Scorpio with red Antares at its back. Where did they learn these things? At their mother’s knees, of course.

Are you with me, here in the cloudy east? This August, drive a few miles away from town’s lights. Find a place to see across a meadow, looking south, away from the trees and those darned yard lights. And enjoy my favorite Scorpio splayed across the sky.

By the way – we’ve been promised a good comet this Fall…

Dac Crossley
July 27, 2013.
Happy Birthday, Bud F.

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.” – Thoreau.

How Hot Was It?

Come back with me to the year 1938. A July afternoon in the little South Texas village of Kingsville. Visit our house out west of town on a caliche-topped road. Sit with me on the front steps. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon and yes, it’s hot.

Mother and baby brother Walter are taking naps on the screened-in back porch. A circulating fan blows across them. It’s a dry heat in July. They’re comfortable. We are accustomed to the heat. The only air-conditioned place in Kingsville is the new Rialto Theater (“Forty Degrees Cooler Inside!”). The movie The Last Days of Pompeii is in town. My uncle may take me to see it.

From my perch on the top porch step I have a clear perspective to the north. Out across the prairie a half-mile away is the “new” highway. No traffic there. I can see the King Ranch headquarters from my perch, a big square white building far in the distance. Nothing stirs, no breeze, no birds, nothing. Occasionally a grasshopper’s click-click. I’m searching across the northern sky. Pale blue fading to an ashen shade in the distance. No clouds. I keep watch.

First I hear it, the low drone of an airplane. But where? I squint at a speck, then another. The sky seems empty. And then it emerges from the haze, a two-engine air liner on its way south. I leap into the yard to watch as it passes overhead. It dwindles into the distance.

It was probably a DC-3, headed for Mexico. Our house was on the flight path to the Valley. A tower beacon sat just south of Kingsville; the next beacon followed at Norias. Air traffic wasn’t much over several thousand feet high. Much air navigation was visual. The airplane would land at Brownsville. That was a Port of Entry and all air traffic landed there. Before the days of the big jets.

There would be plenty of airplanes to amuse me in the coming years. Squads of training planes from the Kingsville Naval Air Station would soar above, mornings and afternoons. Wartime seemed far away in 1938.

Learning to fly an airplane? That’s still on my bucket list.

Dac Crossley
July 21, 2013

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.” – Mark Twain. (with a tip of my hat to Dr. Dave Ludwig).

My Mother's Letters to God

If you were to write a letter to God, where would you mail it? Mother stuck them between the pages in her bible. It came to me, complete with marginal notes and letters when she passed a few decades ago.

Mother grew up in a strict Methodist household, where religion was a dead serious business. I heard my wife’s mother (a Baptist) use the phrase, “Long-faced as a Methodist.” I knew what she meant.

Dismal views didn’t stick with my mother, a joyful person, but she did have a very personal relationship with God. No need for any intermediaries, no saints or Christ necessary for Mom. She talked with God directly. Some of her letters were prayers, pleas for help or expressions of gratitude. Sometimes she questioned. Mother wrote in the margins, as older generations tended to do. Some of her comments are interpretable now.

Hers was the God of the Old Testament. Those stories are some of our oldest literature. Mom related them enthusiastically, interpreting for us, eyes sparkling, arms waving (just as she told me tales of the Texas Revolution).

Forever a school teacher, she read aloud to her classes. Treasure Island. Under the Lilacs. In her latter years she prayed aloud in school. Of course it was against the rules but that didn’t stop her from talking with her God. Her classes in south Texas were a mixture of Anglo, Latino, and Louisiana Cajun, and they loved her for her stories and prayers. I’ve met some of those old students. I believe she literally introduced them to God.

I wonder how she’d cope in today’s world, where religion has been put on a leash? I wouldn’t want the oppressive force of my grandmother’s practices. But would love to hear MoM once again describe the tales of Jonah and Job.

Dac Crossley
July 10, 2013

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.” – Muriel Rukeyser