everything's bigger

I. the iconic
We left Waco and drove the hour and a half to Austin.  I'd been to both cities before, and fondly remembered Austin as a sort of musical, cupcaked southern paradise.  Maybe I've spent too long in Hipster Brooklyn, but Waco and its environs - that part of Texas which I, with no particular authority, tend to think of as Real Authentic Texas - now began to grow on me.  Even the sunblasted parking lots and canyon-sized shopping malls and gun shops.  Real Authentic Texas is many things, but it ain't twee.

On either side of I-35, dusty dirt roads stretched to the horizon or disappeared into the trees.  Nearly all the blue had leached from the sky, and a film of beige settled over farm stands and Tex-Mex joints and abandoned construction equipment.  Well back from the road, farmhouses huddled in oak-green shade.  Occasionally, we passed longhorns grazing placidly.  I could see myself bumping along one of those country roads in a pickup, my dog in the cab and plants thrown in the truck bed.

II. the icons
Graduation aside, it was a Johnson-themed family weekend.  We spent one morning at the LBJ Library.  The building itself is charmingly brutalist, rising out of a stark, geometrical plaza.  I've never before visited a presidential library, and so have no real comparisons, but I thought that the library presented a balanced mix of biography (as most laypeople prefer) and institutional context (as will make most historians comfortable).  Which is to say, you get a sense for the man in his time, and particularly in his dealings with Congress; and all of it seems extraordinary today.  LBJ, I decided, is criminally underrated, too often bookended by the flashier presidencies he followed and preceded.

III. the iconoclast
Equally underrated is his wife, born Claudia Alta Taylor, and better known as Lady Bird.  The next day, we defied the early-May heat to visit the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.  I'd heard of it before, and I always try to visit a city's local parks and gardens.

All LBJ images via the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

The building of the Wildflower Center was the culmination of work that Lady Bird had done over decades, starting with her attempts to beautify Washington, DC.  Jackie Kennedy presided over the White House renovation, but her successor looked beyond the White House gates to a city decaying, building and body and soul.  In 1964, Lady Bird formed the First Lady's Committee for a More Beautiful Capital, then expanded her efforts (alongside health activist Mary Lasker) to create the Society for a More Beautiful National Capital.  They began modestly, planting pansies on the National Mall, and from there expanded their plant list and their targets (Pennsylvania Avenue, parks, a public housing project).

Reading about her efforts, it reminded me a little of Lynden Miller's work in New York City, about which I've written before: design based upon the idea that a community that takes pride in its surroundings can be more just and generous and cohesive.  It was called "beautification," in Lady Bird's time, but she resisted the diminishment implied in the term:

Though the word beautification makes the concept sound merely cosmetic, it involves much more: clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste disposal and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas. To me…beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future. 

As the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center notes, pointedly, "One of her key efforts was to clean up trash and control rats in the Shaw section of Washington" through Operation Pride.  She saw, rightly,  that such improvements - not just to the sacred, symbolic spaces of the nation's capital, but especially to the lowliest neighborhoods in the city - should be a concern for everyone.  Beautiful public spaces could positively impact residents' mental, physical, and environmental health.  Efforts to improve these places were not fluffy or "feminine," they were about enabling people to live with dignity in an environment they could respect.  

Accompanied by busloads of reporters, she visited - and publicized - the glories of America's national parks, from the California Redwoods to my beloved Hudson Valley.  If it now seems as inconceivable to build a dam in the Grand Canyon as it would be to knock down Grand Central - well, you can thank people like Lady Bird that it was not done.   Of course, many others were involved in the effort to beautify America, most notably Laurance S. Rockefeller, whose family had the foresight and the funds to donate 2,500 acres to the Palisades (for which I'm grateful every time I look north along the Hudson), and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who chaired the President's Council on Recreation and Beauty.  But her contemporaries realized how many of these accomplishments were due to Lady Bird's influence, her organizing and, yes, her politicking.  Lady Bird and her aids cannily employed for their cause the same feminine stereotypes that caused men to discount both them and the landscapes for which they lobbied.  (Mary Lasker flirtatiously commented that "Flowers in a city are like lipstick on a woman. You have to have some color"; an aide donned "her best Joy perfume and her tightest girdle" in order to persuade Texan politicians to pass the Highway Beautification Act.)  Her efforts resulted in the legislation for which she is most famous, "Lady Bird's Bill," which aimed to clean up, literally and aesthetically, the nation's highway system.  We might romanticize it now, but in reality the bill was far more controversial and less popular.  As Lawrence Wright depicted the scene:

At one in the morning on Oct. 8, 1965, the House of Representatives finally voted on the Highway Beautification Act — “Lady Bird’s bill,” as Representative Bob Dole, one of the leaders of the opposition, patronizingly called it.  The representatives were supposed to have been at the White House six hours earlier for a “Salute to Congress” dinner, and the gallery was filled with hungry, impatient spouses who had watched their evening plans drown in the tumult on the House floor. 

The bill had already been beaten down once before by allies of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America.  President Lyndon Johnson was undeterred. ... The vote finally passed, 245 to 138, and a few exhausted representatives went to the White House to present the bill as a gift to the first lady.

The obituaries for Lady Bird Johnson ... focused mainly on her advocacy for highway beautification, largely failing to note that nearly all of the 200 laws related to the environment during the Johnson administration had her stamp on them, including the Wilderness Act of 1964, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund and many additions to the national parks system. 

The environmental movement was still new - Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring had been published just a few years earlier - and maybe it was only at the dawn of such a movement that such audacious actions could be taken.

Lady Bird didn't give up on her beautification efforts once she left the White House, whether that meant planting swaths of native plants on Texan highways or encouraging the creation of the Austin park that now wraps the Colorado River.  (On the day that I visited, runners and bikers streamed past a river full of upright paddlers and bobbing dogs and one complicated game of kayak polo.)  And she marked her seventieth birthday with the creation of a wildflower center on the outskirts of Austin, which was later relocated and remodeled into the 279-acre center that now bears her name.

Like all the best designs, the Wildflower Center is rooted in its place, but escapes the jarring symbolism of a theme park.  A vast collection of native plants coexists with a built complex that nods to the vernacular architecture of Texas Hill Country: stone walls leading to water towers, galvanized metal contrasting with a dusty plaza where I imagined busloads of students would gather in the cooler months.  A park for children allows them to splash around in pools and "dig" for dinosaurs.  (The water was sweet and fresh and delighted children and their parents on the day that we visited.)

I recognized some coneflowers and pink evening primrose, but I'd never seen the majority of plants, and was charmed by their common names: Indian paintbrush, Blackfoot daisy, Texas Frogfruit.  Winecup (Caillirhoe involucrata) sloshed crimson across the ground.  Mexican Buckeye looked like a Texan cherry blossom, Kidneywood a sunbleached substitution for crepe myrtle.   (At home, searching online for other plants, I got lost in the vernacular: bladderpod. Bastard-cabbage.)

The purse-lipped flowering vine that I'd thought was clematis was actually "Scarlet leatherflower"- though we were both right; it was Clematis texensis, a member of either the Crowfoot Family or Ranunculacae, depending upon your preferred taxonomy.

I realized that cacti, like ferns, provide a never-ending opportunity for evocative names, the more preposterous the better: the nipple cactus, the lace cactus, the scarlet hedgehog cactus.  There were cacti that grew thickly like privet hedges and cacti that formed fleshy warts and others that bloomed rose-colored.

Many of the plants were erotic and disturbing in a way familiar to those who've ever studied orchids: the pantingly promiscuous display of genitalia; the swollen, hairy seedpods; a yellow prickly-pear cactus, glistening with fluid and covered with bees.

IV. i

A trail broke away from the main complex and ambled toward the low shade of oak and scrub.  I had recently fractured the metatarsal bones of my foot.  I knew that if I walked down to the trail, my foot would feel worse but my soul would feel better, so I hobbled along for a bit, thinking about a woman who could see what others couldn't - and mostly, still can't: the beauty of the red yucca in flower, the need to preserve and conserve and celebrate the common.

"When I was a little girl, I grew up listening to the wind in the pine trees of the East Texas woods," she once remarked.  Lady Bird!  Be still my heart.