Hill country, hummingbirds, and ice cream

The highway made a steep climb

To hills of granite and lime

A cure for the glum

Tiny birds that can hum

And ice cream, a treat that is prime.

Synopsis: I’m a Family Practitioner from Sioux City, Iowa.  In 2010 I danced back from the brink of burnout, and, honoring a 1-year on-compete clause, traveled and worked in out-of-the-way places in Alaska, Nebraska, Iowa, and New Zealand.  After 3 Community Health years, I took temporary gigs in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Canada, and Alaska.  Since the pandemic, I did telemedicine, staffed a COVID-19 clinic in Iowa, worked at the Veterans Administration in South Dakota, held part-time positions close to home, worked 10 weeks in western Pennsylvania, had a 5-month assignment in Northern Iowa, then several months of telemedicine.  I am now in Texas, a big place with a lot of Spanish speakers. 

Sunday morning Bethany and I decided to take a drive into the Hill Country. 

Texas is a very large state with 5 distinctly different ecologic zones.  As it turns out, West Texas is not the same as Southwest Texas. 

We traversed the dry, flat plains, then found ourselves on a highway that climbs abruptly into very broken topography.  The flats have plenty of top soil, but granite and limestone make up the hills. 

It reminded me of the way that the northern slope of Casper Mountain, the tip of a finger of the Rockies, drops onto the Wyoming sage flats of the North Platte River flood plain.

No surprise few people call the area home. 

The empty spaces attract tourists, and when those tourists retire, they like to settle where they used to vacation. 

We passed an area with 8-foot fences, and Bethany spotted animals neither of us had seen.  We pulled over and watched.  Later, using Google Images, we found oryx, black buck, and eland.  I think we also saw a Corsican ram, but I’m not sure.  We didn’t brink binoculars.

Ranching here has come to mean less and less cattle but more and more exotic game animals from Africa and Asia, including giraffes.  And while they’re at it, the owners like to manage for trophy whitetail deer. 

On the way back to town we stopped at a village with an ice cream parlor close to the road. 

We took our generous scoops outside and sat in the shade of a visitor center, closed for Sunday.  They take their hummingbirds seriously, with 11 hummingbird feeders placed near the front entrance, near a blooming palmetto, and another plant with red blossoms. 

We ate leisurely and made little noise.  After a while, the hummingbirds came in, up to 5 working the feeders and the blossoms at the same time. 

Then we saw something we’d never seen before: a hummingbird perched on the lip of the feeder, sipping without hovering.  Over the course of a quarter hour the tiny feathered helicopters ignored us more and more.  One chased another away from a feeder with plenty of room for both. 

And when we drove back, the highway dropped out of the hills and out onto the flats, the rocks gave way to farm ground, over less than a hundred meters.