Stone age men, ancient cultures, Texanna and box turtles get side-door mental access
Simple passions rule a non-conformist's life
If you see a turtle splattered on the road, but it's still trying to move, you can take it home, doctor it with triple antibiotic suave, duct tape it back together and cross your fingers.
Most turtles crossing east Texas roads are box turtles, genus Terrapene. Four species are indigenous to the Geezerplex hinterlands.
"Some have three toes," said Jimmy Brown. Some have more.
Jimmy Brown's a roofer, and arguably among the best of painters on the market, if you can get him to paint.
What he likes is roofing. He likes it best when it's hottest, he said. He looks like a man well adjusted to sun.
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Like his features, he's lean, with coal black shoulder length hair. By summer's end, he's brown as the Indians he trails along sandy creeks.
Clipped beside his front door are clothes pins for customers wanting to leave him notes.
Jimmy doesn't have a phone. Or air conditioning.
Who'd fritter away money on things like that?
These turtles, they say, survived whatever killed the dinosaurs. They've been right here that long.
Cold-blooded reptiles, they stalk the earth in summer, gorging on grubs and worms, fallen fruit, berries and leaves. It's a time of feast, and those surviving highway crossings are moving now into a dangerous time, writes Tess Cook, author of a definitive work on box turtles.
Jimmy is a student of, among other things, Mrs. Cook's work with box turtles, stone-age nomads, ancient cultures and Texas history.
It's a dangerous time for all reptiles because as the world cools down, instinct nudges them toward hibernation.
As opposed to restful sleep, hibernation is a time when bodily functions keep them barely alive.
Their heart rate slows.
Digestion stops.
They can't voluntarily move, even to open an eye.
They exist, and if they haven't burrowed deeply enough beneath the frost line, an extended cold snap freezes them.
If rains aren't timely, the ground may be too hard for them to dig out in spring.
Being cold blooded, if they've not got enough body mass, just the tiny beat of their heart can drain away the last calorie of energy, like when a car door isn't shut and the dome light slowly drains the battery flat, except you can't jump start a turtle.
But sometimes, you can fix one with duct tape.
In the pen where he keeps adults of breeding age, Jimmy fished box turtles from their hiding places.
"This turtle," he said, holding one with a long scar bisecting a segment of hard shell, "I doctored him and taped him back together."
He recognizes the revitalized reptile as male by the slight depression in the shell along its underside.
The temperature-critical thing about reptiles is vital information for Jimmy, one of the area's few box turtle breeders.
"These little babies," he said. "If you want to keep them eating, you've got to keep them warm."
He keeps this year's crop of 32 hatchlings in his carpeted kitchen. The rest of the tidy white frame house has hardwood floors.
Jimmy shares with his baby turtles that relationship between temperature and nutrition. In winter, the kitchen carpet is cozy for both turtles and bare feet.
"I don't like to stand barefoot on a cold floor while I'm cooking breakfast," he said, punctuating the thought with a lament for the coming winter.
In nature, which for Jimmy's turtles is the back yard, his babies would be slowing down about now. According to Mrs. Cook, when the temperature drops below 65 degrees at night, the sun has to warm turtles before they'll move out and forage.
Tempt them all you want with fresh-diced veggies, cat food, berries and chopped worms. They won't eat a bite until they warm up, she says, and if it doesn't warm up, they just pull back in their shells and wait for better times.
Few survive their first year, Mrs. Cook said. Ants, birds, rodents and snakes all love baby turtle a la cart.
Jimmy began collecting box turtles with a blonde-headed kid from his south-side blue collar neighborhood. He's the kind of man imaginative kids - or adults, for that matter - love because he tells stories about Indians and wars.
He's big on the Alamo.
Concerning turtles, "I got to thinking," he said, "that as long as I'd been alive, I'd never seen a baby turtle."
He started asking "old timers," and didn't find a one who'd ever seen a baby turtle. So he decided to catch some and let them breed.
The kid up the street approved the program and the pair added turtle collecting to Saturdays spent wandering creeks, looking for ancient Indian camps. Jimmy told stories of Texas, and they both kept an eye out for box turtles.
Last March 6, a neighbor came over to ask why Jimmy was out on his lawn, running the flag to the top of his flag pole, then reverently lowering it to half mast.
"You didn't hear?" Jimmy asked.
No, said the neighbor.
"Somewhere between 165 and 185 men died," Jimmy said, clearly incredulous.
"What? Where?"
"The Alamo," Jimmy said. That siege lasted two weeks, ending March 6, 168 years before Jimmy lowered the Texas flag at sunset that day.
Jimmy likes wandering his mind's side doors. The same way a hair brush microphone can unleash an alter-ego bathroom mirror rock star, Jimmy thinks sometimes about what it would be like to be governor of Texas.
"Every child would get left behind until they could tell me the story of the Texas revolution, beginning to end," he said.
And another thing.
He's disgusted by legislators who approved the sale of bonds to repair the Battleship Texas, then didn't create any way to pay the bonds.
If Jimmy were governor, "I'd have some boys in my office," he said. According to Parks and Wildlife officials where the ship sits docked at San Jacinto Battlefield, it needs $20 million in repairs. There's an article about it on Jimmy's dining room table, among other important documents.
Of course, it was 76 years after the decisive battle in the Texas Revolution was fought at San Jacinto that the Battleship Texas was commissioned in 1912.
In World War I, the American destroyer served as flagship for the British Navy. In World War II, it saw action in the Atlantic. After the German surrender, it went steaming away to the Pacific to take on the Japanese.
If Jimmy were governor, and if the movie makers had asked, he could have helped the makers of The Alamo, starring Dennis Quaid and Billy Bob Thornton.
"That scene where they've got Crockett kneeling in front of Santa Anna right before all those boys run him through with their swords, that's not right," Jimmy said.
"Suzanne Dickerson walked out of there alive, and she said all of them were dead when she left," Jimmy says. "That's what Texas history is based on."
Other than that, the movie's on target, he said, which makes it all the more frustrating.
"It's a shame," Jimmy said, "when folks have the chance to get things right and they don't."
When he watches the movie, Jimmy gets out a 44-year-old Texas history text and follows along as the actor portraying William Travis delivers word for word excerpts from the letter to Sam Houston, calling for reinforcements.
Travis's letter is on display in Austin, and when Jimmy goes to visit the Alamo, which he plans to do, he's going through Austin, he says, to see the paper on which Travis wrote, the ink he rolled over those pages.
From San Antonio, he'll head for the Texas coast and San Jacinto.
If he wants to, instead of his work truck, Jimmy could take his Texas liberty tour rumbling down the highway on the motorcycle parked in his living room.. It's old, but it looks new. There's a soft, worn wash rag tucked between the seat and the gas tank to cushion and protect its paint.
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Jimmy takes care of business.
Concerning business, he has a simple working formula.
If you spend less than you make, you'll always have money in the bank. His grandfather pointed that out.
Like his people, Jimmy's frugal. His inheritance includes his grandmother's "tackle box," a 3 ½-inch tall tin that, in 1929, held Maxwell House Tea. Inside now are hunks of unshapen lead, a single cork, two sizes of line and a couple of hooks, all she needed when she went to the creek.
It sits on the dining room table now, among books, papers and stone tools.
One tool is fashioned of polished blue granite. It's a stone axe, smooth as a river rock.
Like other artifacts, Jimmy found it here, but there's no such rock here. It's origin is a puzzle triggering thoughts about ancient trade routes.
There's a stone maul, too, several hundred or thousands of years old.
Who knows?
What Jimmy knows is that he can wrap his hand around it, and feel the finger grooves where it was worn by the hand of some ancient man.
"Along this time of year, that man might have been using it to break hickory nuts," Jimmy said.
Mental side doors savor the processing of information like that, something to wonder about.
When summer's heat arrives, mama turtles lay their eggs. Her work done, the mama turtle abandons the eggs, leaving them to be incubated by the heat of the soil.
"There's nothing she can do for them," Jimmy points out.
After losing successive hatches, Jimmy made a rare long distance call, turning to academia.
Texas A & M hooked him up with Dr. Lee Fitgerald, who told Jimmy about Mrs. Cook's treatise on box turtles.
Hovering over this year's crop of babies like a kid with match box cars, one by one Jimmy moved the hatchlings into a shallow pan of distilled water, warmed.
"Keep them warm and instead of hibernating, they'll just keep eating and crawling around," Jimmy said, which is good. Babies should put on weight, but there's a fine line there, too.
Pack their diet with too much protein and they can put on weight faster than they develop the leg and neck muscles needed to right themselves should they tump over.
Turtles are prone to tumping. It's that round shell thing.
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Among the treasures on Jimmy's table is the hand-written note Dr. Fitzgerald sent from A & M, along with the package of materials introducing Jimmy to Mrs. Cook.
"Good luck, Jimmy!" the professor wrote.
"All these babies," Jimmy mused as he watched his turtles drinking. "They're alive because I got help from two people I've never met."
It's something to consider for a mind made perfectly content by life's riddles.