Roy Bedichek: The Texas naturalist

1. An individual voice

I love the minor writers. I’ve spent more time with Charles Lamb and Sir Thomas Browne than with Dante or Shakespeare.

Each generation produces a minor writer or two whose work survives because they attract, in each succeeding generation, a few readers who are unreasonably devoted. The readers are drawn by a voice that seems to speak not to the crowd but to them.

Roy Bedichek, who lived most of his life in Austin, Texas, is such a writer. He died in 1959, but people who loved him could still be found at the University of Texas in the 1970s, when I arrived as a student. Bedichek’s influence, if not his ghost, haunted the campus, though he never taught there.

Today, if he’s known at all, it’s for a couple of books of essays he wrote late in life: Adventures with a Texas Naturalist and Karánkaway Country. He also wrote a small but astonishing book on The Sense of Smell, published a year after he died. Bedichek wrote as he thought, talked and lived: as an observer of nature.

The university of 50 years ago had Nobel laureates on the faculty and a nuclear reactor in the Physics Building. The university made little impression on me. When I think about what an educated person should be, I hear Bedichek’s quirky, distinctive voice.

2. Three quests

I think, but am not sure, that Bedichek’s life can be understood in terms of three quests.

First, he was on a quest to learn. He thought that trait made us human. He was on a quest to learn, to improve his mind. The contents of his storehouse are astonishing.

Second, he was on a quest to use his learning to make his life better, which to him meant putting the different parts of his life in order and keeping them in balance. Perhaps the most important thing we humans can learn is how to govern ourselves, how best to order and balance our lives. As a person learns more, he should use his experience and wisdom to make everything better. He should make better meals and do the daily chores more efficiently. Bedichek was on a quest for that kind of order and balance.

Third, the combination of those two quests forms a third — a quest for completeness. Bedichek was not a specialist and he was out of place at the university, where the Ph.D. is the minimum credential. The life of the specialist was not what he valued. He wanted a broader view of the cosmos, rather than a profound understanding of any one part of it. You can hear in his voice the longing to be a complete person, a whole person, a healthy person.

I think it makes sense to look at his life in terms of those three quests, but I’m not sure of that. This is an essay of that notion.

3. The well stocked mind

At Barton Springs, there’s a statue that depicts three friends — Bedichek, the writer J. Frank Dobie and the historian Walter Prescott Webb — having a conversation. The statue is at Caliban’s Rock, where the friends met to talk.

Bedichek and Dobie would fry on the limestone like lizards and then swim in the cold water, a process that, repeated often enough, removes every nerve from your body. Dobie would sometimes get so steamed during the conversation he’d swim away to cool off. Often the conversations would continue at a Mexican café.

Dobie told how a young man once sat in on a conversation, listening with the interest of a journalist. Bedichek, noting the young man’s interest, and fearing his friends might get carried away when the conversation got hot, quoted Burns as a warning:

A chield’s amang you takin notes, 

And, faith, he’ll prent it.

The lines were from “On The Late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations Thro’ Scotland,” a poem on a retired army officer known for writing about his travels. Dobie wondered how Bedichek could store lines from an obscure poem in his memory and recite them at just the right moment. Dobie marveled at his friend’s “well stocked mind.”

It’s a useful phrase for understanding Bedichek, whose mind was a storehouse of wonders. He could spend a morning watching a vermillion flycatcher and tell you how this bird from Mexico had extended its range into Texas. He could tell you how to grow, prepare and eat food. He noticed things and thought about the nature of birds and of men. He knew what other observers had said.

Bedichek stocked his mind with interesting things and shared them in conversations, letters and books.

4. Order and balance

Bedichek liked to begin the day by reading a passage from Plato or Aristotle, just to get started. He read the ancient Greeks, who admired balance — a sense or proportion, order and moderation.

“Nothing in excess” was, after “Know yourself,” the second axiom of the Greek mind.

Balance was the antidote to obsession. Employers like workers who approach their jobs with single-minded devotion. Great workers, whether they are chief executives are new interns, are great when they take work home and are on call seven days a week.

To many thinkers among the ancient Greeks, this was not greatness but a flaw.

A person who focuses so much on one part of life that he loses perspective on the whole has made a tragic mistake. The story of a father focused so much on his career that fails his children sounds like a modern story, but it was known to Plato.

Being focused on an art or occupation doesn’t excuse you from the greater business of being a person. You can and should be a good worker, but you must also be a good person in general, that is a good citizen, a good spouse, a good parent, a good friend. The Greeks thought a sound polity — they talked about a community, rather than a state — depended on that kind of individual excellence.

And so they valued order — a place in every life for all the aspects of life. Socrates made time for work, family, and philosophy, of course, but he also served his country as a soldier in two major battles and made time for the theater.

And they further insisted that those parts be kept in balance, a kind of harmony. It was a flaw to devote no time and attention to your work. It was also a flaw to devote all your time to work.

A balanced person can do more than one thing. He or she has mastered many skills, which is good, since life presents all sorts of challenges. 

Bedichek talked of the Challenge of Theseus. Theseus, in Greek legend, prepared himself to face whatever challenge that Fate threw at him on any given day. We usually think of challenges in terms of our work — whatever challenge the corporation is facing. But the challenge that Fate presents might be consoling a child over the loss of a pet or consoling a friend over the death of a parent. The challenge might be a difficult boss or a traffic accident. It might be the puzzle of how spend an unexpected day off in the best possible way.

Being prepared for whatever Fate presents is a challenging notion of preparation, which is one way of looking at education. Can you imagine a college that claimed to prepare its students for whatever challenge Fate might present?

Bedichek was a balanced man. He wrote books, nurtured a family, cultivated friendships, and studied nature. Because he was concerned about the food his family ate, he gardened, and, at least at one point, milked a cow. He thought about what would be a proper religion. He wondered how a vermillion flycatcher, a spectacularly beautiful bird from Mexico, came to live in Central Texas.

5. The complete man

Bedichek’s two quests — the quest for a well stocked mind and quest for a life that was ordered and balanced — formed a larger virtue that a perceptive friend described as completeness.

That friend was H. Mcwhinney, a Houston newspaperman. After Bedichek died, Mcwhinney described a session of Texas storytellers at a camp. Storytelling is an art in Texas, and there were star performances. After the talk died down, everyone ate dinner and took a nap. Bedichek washed the dishes.

“This is a simple act,” Mcwhinney wrote. “Millions of people, mostly women, wash the dishes every day. But it is not often that you see an artist, a scholar, a naturalist, and a teacher of young men wash the dishes.”

Bedichek wanted to know how to do the things — all the things — that make a life. And so he wanted to know how to grow his own food, cook it and clean up afterwards. He wanted to know how best to do those things and he wanted to do them.

He wanted to be able to find his way about the land where he lived, its plants and birds. He wanted to know the stars of the night sky. He wanted to know what the great people of the past had said about things, but he wanted to know the challenges of living himself.

You learn about many of these things in the same way you learn about washing dishes: by doing.

6. Earning a living

Bedichek was born in 1878 in Cass County, Ill. His father, a former Confederate soldier, and his mother had been in Illinois training as teachers. His father returned the family to Texas and established a school in Eddy, about 20 miles south of Waco. He also farmed. As Dobie noted, Bedichek grew up hearing philosophy discussed at the dinner table.

Bedichk had the privilege of education. He didn’t have money. He worked as a farmhand, a store clerk and a secretary in a law office to earn money for college.

Bedichek was self-educated before he got to the University of Texas. At the law offices, he met men who read books for pleasure and talked about them. 

He met Lillian Greer, the woman he intended to marry. They concocted Operation Bootstrap, a plan to homestead land in Deming, N.M. He would travel ahead to claim the land, and she would join him.

Bedichek bicycled from Eddy to El Paso and then got a freight train to Deming. He got involved with the local paper, The Headlight — a rags to riches to rags story — and eventually worked for the chamber of commerce.

The Bedicheks returned to Texas. He worked in San Antonio, San Angelo, Houston and Austin as a teacher, newspaperman and executive for business associations.

He eventually got a post with the University Interscholastic League and later became its second director. The league organizes competitions throughout the state for high school students. Although it’s best known as the governing body for sports, it also organizes competitions to encourage music, drama, math and other arts and academic subjects.

Rodney J. Kidd told of traveling with Bedichek on league business for 20 years. “We always preferred camp sites to hotels, streams and lakes to bathtubs, and Dutch ovens to the finest restaurants,” he wrote.

Bedichek had camping spots all over the state. The backseat of his car came out, and two small mattresses went in. A 5-gallon can was the water source. They carried cooking gear and a nature library. 

Bedichek loved to cook on a grill over a campfire. He’d cook, while Kidd set up camp. They’d eat and watch birds until the sun set. Bedichek would predict where the morning star would be at 4 a.m., his rising time.

Kidd put his mattress far away from his friend’s. Bedichek was known to snore.

7. The retreat

Kidd said Bedichek would wake up early, find the Morning Star and have a cup of coffee. Then the conversation would start. The conversation, his friends agreed, was remarkable. Bedichek’s letters are like his conversation. You learn something while being entertained.

When his friends pressed him to write an autobiography, Bedichek said he’d already done it. It was all there in his letters. His thoughts were more important than the events of his life, he said, and the thoughts were in his letters.

That was true, but his friends wanted a book. And so, as Bedichek was approaching 70, his friends more or less abducted him and installed him at Friday Mountain Ranch, which Webb owned. A grant covered Bedichek’s salary for an academic year, allowing him to retire a year early.

Friday Mountain is just 20 miles west of Austin, and Bedichek went to town on weekends to see his family and mow the grass. But the freedom from distractions did allow him to write Adventures with a Texas Naturalist.

He wrote from The Camp, a 20-by-20 foot room on the second floor of a limestone building dating from the 1850s. Bedichek had to put his camp in order before he could allow himself the leisure to write. In a wonderful letter, which he turned into the introduction to the book, he described how he organized the space.

The room had a big stone fireplace. Bedichek did his cooking there and had a crane put in for handling pots. In the room was an enormous round table, big enough for a 10-hand game, which had been seized by Texas rangers from a poker den.

Bedichek used apple boxes as cases for books and files and as a cupboard in the kitchen. He had curtains sewn from canvas duck for the four big windows.

In a nod to economy, he ate his meals on his typing table. Almost everything was functional, although he had “a student-lamp for looks, and an electric floor-lamp for light.” On his trips to town, he scoured junk stores, looking for a rocking chair.

8. Essays on natural history

The book that came out of that retreat is a collection of essays. My favorite is “Still Water,” which begins with the puzzle of why the vermillion flycatcher came up from Mexico to Central Texas.

The bird, whose waistcoat is fancier than the cardinal’s, needs two things: semi-arid landscape and still water. The flies it feeds on live in water that is still, rather than flowing.

Still water came to the arid Texas Hill Country in the early 20th century. Lake Medina was built west of San Antonio in 1913, and the Highland Lakes were built around Austin in the 1930s. Also thousands of tanks, as manmade cattle ponds are known in Texas, were built in the 1920s and ‘30s. Mankind changed the landscape, and that changed the bird’s range. It was at least partly an unforeseen consequence of the New Deal. 

The essay has a second theme: frogs, a prolific and nearly brainless source of food. Bedichek once watched a little snake unhinge its jaws to eat one. It took about 30 minutes. Bedichek’s description is painful to read. By contrast, it’s a relief when he tells us that raccoons eat frogs delicately, as a sophisticate human diner eats hors d’oeuvres.

The digression on frogs came out logically. Bedichek had watched a tank fill up with water, and noted the progression of living things that moved in: minnows, snakes, frogs.

Frogs, he thought, were a food source that could drive an ecosystem. It’s wasn’t just the physical features of the reservoir, but its inhabitants, that made it possible for the vermilion flycatcher to extend its range. The tanks changed the ecology of the Texas Hill Country within five years.

A rare bird is a headline, but the arrival of a new bird extending its range is history, Bedichek said. He thought that, in the case of the vermilion flycatcher, parades and ceremonies on the courthouse square were in order.

9. The Coastal Plain

Two other books followed: Karánkaway Country, another collection of essays, several of which are about Texas’ vast coastal plains, and The Sense of Smell. The name of the essay collection comes from the Karankawa people, who were masters of the coastal environment. They moved seasonally, knowing the best time to find oysters, flounder, redfish and bison along the bays, bayous and plains.

The Karankawa, well nourished by European standards, shocked the Spanish by their height. Six-foot men were common among the Karankawa, rare among the Europeans of that day. Cabeza de Vaca stayed with the Karankawas after being shipwrecked on the Isle of Misfortune in 1536.

A collision of cultures is a collision of beliefs. Europeans believed then, as they believe now, that the oceans cannot be owned and therefore must be shared. The Karankawas had the same view about the land. They could not understand the belief that land could be owned.

Texans have soaked the phrase “property rights” in blood. Bedichek recalled that one of the leading families of Victoria, a town around the Coastal Bend, tried to poison a whole band of Karankawa people with arsenic in hominy. That attempt was thwarted when the pharmacist used cream of tarter instead. It was a rare failure.

In 1855, 300 years after the Karankawa people first encountered Europeans, six or eight remained on the Texas Coast. Bedichek thought the last survivor had lived in Tamaulipas.

Bedichek was 15 when he got his first look at the Gulf, from the site of what would become the Buccaneer Hotel, at 23rd and Seawall in Galveston. Bedichek, a farm boy from Central Texas, had seen acre ponds before. His first view of endless water was the kind of discovery that can free a person’s imagination.

Bedichek reported that the Texas pioneers often mentioned a peculiar trait of the Karankawas. They would stand silently and watch the sun set, knowing that it would rise again from the sea. Bedichek regarded the “Karankaway trance” as some kind of religious exercise or observance. A Karankawa would stop, become still and watch.

Bedichek thought that sunset was simply too much for the conceptual structure. Did the people of the Texas Coast fear that the burning sun might go out, as it seemed to have to return through water?

Their understanding of the world had limits. Bedichek pointed out that we could say the same thing of ourselves.

10. Letters

His books contain wonderful things, but the best of Bedichek is in his letters.

Two collections have been published: Letters of Roy Bedichek, edited by William A. Owens and Lyman Grant, and The Roy Bedichek Family Letters, selected by Jane Gracy Bedichek. I couldn’t do without either.

Bedichek was interested in the question the ancient Greeks posed: How do you live a good life? He didn’t think a good life could be accounted for through a theory or system. When he inquired about a person, be it a cedar chopper or a university professor, he tried to get to a few principles that guided that person’s life and a few examples of how the principles worked in practice. 

And so when I dip into the letters to find out what Bedichek had to say as he was going about the business of life, I look for a few principles and some examples.

In looking for guidance, Bedichek recommended reading the ancient Greeks. He loved the historians, Thucydides, Herodotus and Xenophon. Among the dramatists, he preferred Aeschylus to Euripides. He told Aristophanes’ story about Dionysus being sent to hell to bring back Euripides to write one more play. But Dionysus returned with Aeschylus, who’d just won a hell-wide competition for best play.

When he talked about religious impulses, Bedichek recommended a daily walk with a pair of binoculars and a lively sense of curiosity. “I can think of no better religious conditioning for the duties of the day than just such communion. It’s better, I think, than the Catholic habit of an early morning devotion in the cathedral, which, of course, has its points.”

Bedichek was the oldest of the three friends who met at Calaban’s rock for conversation. Webb and Dobie were 10 years younger. As the friends marked their advancing years, Bedichek leading the way, he assured the others that years were just inventions of man. The real clocks, he said, were waistline, eyesight and mood.

He was surprisingly adamant about hobbies: “From the standpoint of mental health, I consider a hobby absolutely a necessity for every normal human being. I care not what it is as long as it is not criminal. A man with a genuine vocation must have an avocation, that is a ‘calling away.’ He must forget for a while his vocation in a complete absorption in some other activity, else he goes stale. Expense is not to be considered in this matter.”

And he was fanatical about doing the dishes. He spoke of the duty of all to do a share of the chores. He warned men, especially, of the failure to attack a dirty skillet or pot immediately. Soaking the pot overnight was a failure of courage.

Bedichek put his mind to the problem. He gave recipes for one-pot meals and talked of the pleasures of eating out of the pan. He exulted in cheating the dishpan out of a plate.

He thought about the chores and urged those he loved to think likewise. It was a poor thinker, a poor human being, who didn’t do his fair share.

11. The Best talk

 “The best talk among men is meaty with anecdotes of character, specimens of human nature,” said J. Frank Dobie, who was a connoisseur. Perhaps it’s why he loved Bedichek. 

Dobie thought you could tell a story of a place through its people, and that might be the best way to tell a story. Asked about Texas and the Southwest, he told about people.

When Bedichek died, Dobie tried to describe him in an essay, “My Friend, Roy Bedichek.

Dobie found it easy to show how Bedichek did simple things. It was much harder to describe the quality of Bedichek’s mind.

And so Dobie told how his friend went to bed with the chickens and loved the outdoors — how he liked to cook, eat and be outdoors. He described a man who loved the quail and the stars.

Dobie told how Bedichek liked his pickup truck, a ’51 Dodge, and hauled his own wood for the fireplace and manure for the garden. He told how Bedichek organized the truck with camping gear, including a tent-fly. He said Bedichek always took along something to read, meaning literature, as well as something to consult, meaning a field guide.

“Above all, he took along the most richly and variously stored mind I have known,” Dobie said.

12. A good death

Bedichek died while waiting for Lillian to finish cooking a pan of cornbread. He had some errands to do and asked his wife how long it would take for the cornbread to cook. Dobie, who inquired about the matter, said his friend’s last words were: “I’ll wait for it.”

If I could choose the way I die, that would be it, waiting on cornbread.

13. Bibliography

• If you want to understand Bedichek, the letters come first.

Letters of Roy Bedichek, edited by William A. Owens and Lyman Grant, Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1985

The Roy Bedichek Family Letters, selected by Jane Gracy Bedichek, Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 1998

• Bedichek’s books are:

Adventures With a Texas Naturalist, Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1994

Karánkaway Country, Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1974

Educational Competition: The Story of the University Interscholastic League, Austin: The University Interscholastic League, 1956

The Sense of Smell, Michael Joseph, 1960

• Books about the friendship of Bedichek, Dobie and Webb:

Three Friends: Bedichek, Dobie, Webb by William A Owens

Three Men in Texas: Bedichek, Webb, and Dobie, edited by Ronnie Dugger. This is a collection of essays by their friends in the Texas Observer. This book contains many of the pieces quoted in this essay, including J. Frank Dobie’s “My Friend, Roy Bedichek,” H. Mcwhinney’s “One full man,” and Rodney J. Kidd’s  “Out-of-Doors Hotel.”

• Notes: J. Frank Dobie’s beautiful “Essay on Bedichek” is in Out of the Old Rock, Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. His observations about the best talk are from the introduction to that book.