By: Gordon Lee
I grew up on a dairy farm in western Montana on the Flathead Indian Reservation at the foot of the Mission Mountain Primitive Area. The farm, of course, meant spending a lot of time outside, but milking cows, irrigating, stacking hay, and harvesting grain along with the other tedium of farming, regardless of weather, were things that had to be done, not things to be enjoyed. I could not wait to get off the farm. The farm made college an attractive option.
After three years of college, I dropped out, realizing that education was irrelevant. It was in the 1960s, which meant the draft notice arrived shortly. After the military, I went to the University of Montana in Missoula, deciding I needed to give education another try. Life in the lumber mills was not attractive. At the university, I had the fortune of rooming with a geology major and a forestry major, both of whom wanted to do a lot of backpacking. It was spending time in the mountains, especially the Bitterroot Mountains and the Mission Mountains where I grew up, and gleaning all kinds of information about the geology, the plants, and the animals that I started gaining an appreciation of nature that I never had on the farm.
After teaching high school for three years in Wyoming, I decided to go back to school rather than slitting my wrists. I got a masters degree from Arizona State University in English and then, realizing that I loved being a student, I got a PhD in British literature from the University of Tennessee–while learning to appreciate the flora of the Smoky Mountains in my haphazard fashion.
My wife, Sandy, and I have lived in Stephenville for the last four and one half years, moving here from Houston, where I had lived for twenty-five years, teaching at a community college in Baytown. Sandy is currently the Dean of Applied Science at Ranger College, where she is over the nursing programs and the EMT program.
I had been an avid road cyclist for over twenty years before a bee sting on the cheek gave me a serious case of photo-sensitivity and brought an end to that hobby after I had lived in Stephenville for about a year. The combination of laziness and a flat tire have kept me off the bike for the last couple years.
I learned about the Master Naturalist program while I was still teaching full-time from a colleague. After semi-retirement—that is doing the same thing I had been doing before retirement for a lot less money—I first joined the Native Plant Society of Texas, and then I took the Master Naturalist training in the Gulf Coast Chapter.
What I like about the Master Naturalists is knowing a little bit about a whole lot of things. It satisfies my native curiosity. After I got my certification, my wife was so proud that she was bragging to one of her friends that I had become a master naturalist. Her friend, knowing what a naturalist was because her brother was one on one of the naturalist beaches in Florida, wanted to know how one becomes a master naturalist.
While the native plants have been my most compelling interest, I have also learned to appreciate a lot of other aspects of our natural world. I want to know more about the deep history of where I am when I stop by a roadside, but geology seems to require too many memory chips at this point in my life.
Having lived for nearly thirty years in Texas, I know very little about the state. I know some of the upper gulf coast and am learning about north central Texas, but my experience of the state is embarrassingly limited. I am looking forward to the trip to Fort Davis State Park in the spring.