Hopkins DB

Home, Home on the Range Subdivision

Last summer I did some work for a real estate development company in Austin. Basically, what they did was build shopping centers around up and coming subdivisions. One particular area that I did work in was about twenty miles south of the University of Texas in a small but rapidly-growing town called Kyle, Texas. Unfortunately it looks something like this:

[4] Image of subdivision construction with the placement of huge underground sewage systems that disrupt natural root patterns.

In that area there are over 10,000 homesites that will be developed within the next decade, and that number (if the economy turns around) will probably increase two or three-fold. Driving through one of these subdivisions is likely to give you nightmares of vinyl siding for the rest of your life. The communities are simple concrete jungles with sidewalks and paved roads throughout. The land that, not even 5 years ago, was sprawling grasslands and plains with creeks, streams, and cattle extending west into the creek-filled hill-laden countryside of central Texas has now become a breeding ground for half-acre lots and St. Augustine grass. Nothing natural remains. One subdivision even boasts an executive 9-hole par three golf course. Sure, that may be a lot of land, but none of the grass that was there on that golf course was native to the land. Everything, including the vegetation, is artificial. Long ago Hopkins saw it coming:

"After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
Ten or twleve, only ten or twelve
Strokes of havoc unselve
The sweeet especial scene
Rural scene, a rural scene,
sweet especial rurual scene." [1]

Thousands of families have purchased houses in Kyle, Texas in the past several years, but they're all Hopkins' "after-comers" and, as he says, he truly cannot guess what beauty had been there before them. Part of my job was to compare aerial maps, and I saw what development had occurred within the last ten years and it was much more beautiful beforehand.

[5] Here is an image of a subdivision next to land that has recently been cleared. All the vegetation is unnatural to the area.

But the truth is, I can't even begin to understand even with pictures in front of me. The experience of standing in a field of native grasses surrounded by the wildlife of North America is much different from sitting in a plastic office chair staring at a picture under fluorescent lighting. Perhaps Hopkins was right, as Bump says that "man also posed a serious threat to nature's frailty: Hopkins's 'Our make and making break, are breaking, down" suggests not only that man's basic structure, his make, is disintegrating, but even his attempts at construction, his making, is itself a breaking." [2]. Could it be reality that even in our vast constructions we are only destroying not only the natural habitats that once were, but also the support of our very existence? It couldn't be more true. There isn't much hope for the future, as we can only tell our children such meek and almost hopeless quotes as that statement of despair from Jude, "Be a good boy, remember; and be kind to animals and birds, and read all you can."[3]. There's not much left to stop the cogs in the great machine from turning and constructing that which will eventually destroy us all.

About ten years ago my father purchased a piece of property outside of Morgan, TX with the intention of leaving it in its natural state. The property had barely been modified for the past two hundred years, and it was his intention to allow it to remain as native as possible. However, man has so tampered with the course of nature that even allowing a property to remain natural presents its challenges. Cedars, which once existed only on hills due to wild sweeping natural fires that would consume the countryside, now root out almost all other tree life and have become ubiquitous. Native grasses have trouble growing because the nutrients in the soil are unbalanced by non-native crops that neighboring farms have brought in. Ten years ago my father bought roughly 500 acres of land. Now the property has grown to over 3,000 acres and promises to be one of the last refuges for native land in the area, and its the best thing he's ever done. But there's no telling that in 50 or 60 years when subdivisions become omnipresent in the area that one might be tempted into selling the land off at a premium. As long as it stays in the family, I know that will not happen.

[6] An image of my friends and I in front of a spring-fed creek that is cold year-round. Most all of the trees and vegetation surrounding us are native to the area. This is an important source of clean water for animals.

[7] My friend and I in one of our many lakes that cater to a diverse array of area wildlife from turtles to hares to deer to cattle to wild hog to lizards to birds to fish to snakes to bobcats, etc.

[1] Hopkins, Gerald Manley. "A Delightful Lie." Excerpt from a poem. Course Packet Jenn's 2008: 635.
[2] Bump, Jerome. "Hopkins's Tragic Vision," from Gerard Manley Hopkins. http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~bump/Hopkins's%20Tragic%20Vision.html
[3] Hardy, Thomas. "Jude the Obscure." Norton, 2005.
[4] http://www.marshconstruction.net/images/picture5.jpg
[5] http://www.eacg.com/images/survey5_lg.jpg
[6] Proprietary image.
[7] Proprietary image.