Land can bring quiet and slowness to lives blasted by the ceaseless bombast of social media and popular culture. Sometimes the best tweets worth noting should come from actual birds.
Rather, the want for more country is…the desire for more aloneness and more majesty, for different varmints and plants and rocks. It’s to have the chance to know a place, to start the long romance of finding out what birds nest in which trees, of how the water courses in heavy rain, of stumbling across the midden flint from some long-ago knapper or figuring out how to best cover the bare spots of land still raw and sore from when cattle and goats grazed there ages ago.
– “For Love of Country” in Texas Monthly (02.15) by Sterry Butcher
