Almost every Monday Chica and I can count on a bracing one-hour walk in Brackenridge Park with our mistresses’ walking group, the Brackenridge Belles. But this week the ladies went bush. Literally.
Three-plus hours south of San Antonio and a mere eight miles from the Mexican border, the brushy desert-like San Pedro Ranch, co-owned by one of the walkers, is a radical departure from the park. This is where the ladies drove on Sunday afternoon. Knowing them, I'm sure they were gossiping all the way down.
The San Pedro is inhabited by the likes of coyotes, javelinas, wild hogs, red shouldered hawks, bobcats, rattlesnakes, even the occasional mountain lion--none, I might say, friends to little Chihuahuas.
As the ladies approached the headquarters, a large rattler lay dead on the road, just killed. Once they got to the complex of white stucco buildings that comprise the headquarters (one of the buildings is a historic stagecoach stop), their hostess explained that the snake would be draped over a fence in accordance with Mexican legend--which holds that doing so will bring rain.
There is a rich profusion of spiny plants on this flat, far-as-the-eye-can-see stretch of land. They range from several varieties of cactus, including five types of prickly pear, to white and black brush, whose blooms perfumed the air with the smell of spring; huajillo, which closes its leaves in the heat of the day; tasajillo, whose red berries are favorites of wild turkey; and Spanish dagger.
After a good night's sleep and a morning walk, the ladies drove over a portion of the ranch, guided by a range management specialist who is helping the owners select the least environmentally harmful spots to place new drilling sites, since the ranch is in the Eagle Ford. The ladies were fascinated both with lessons in native plants and in the process of drilling for oil.
Who knew that so much care can be taken in selecting a drilling site with respect to drainage and plant diversity? That sites are then cleared and flattened into a "platform" resembling a home building site before drilling and fracking with underground water? At the San Pedro Ranch, even the color of storage tanks--painted a grayish green-- are considered, so as blend in better with the landscape.
While Chica and I would have loved to have been with our mistress and her friends, as soon as we heard about the rattlesnake (not to mention the coyotes, hawks, bobcats and mountain lions) we were happy not to have been included. Hopefully, however, we’ll be there when our mistress takes the ladies up to our tame little place in the Hill Country.
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