The
Natural History
of a
New World Twilight
Zone
The Dimension of Imagination lies between the Pit of Human Fears & the Summit of Knowledge. This is the Twilght Zone. (after R. Sterling)
Birding God, Roger Tory Peterson, broke Audubon's shotgun on his knee, picked up binoculars, loaded a paintbrush, & invented the modern field guide. His classic 1960 A Field Guide to the Birds of Texas, begins with his hand-drawn map of a great "Twilight Zone" (his words), a fuzzy north-south ribbon up & down Texas & beyond, where many western species find an eastern limit & eastern species a western limit. Here most of North America's bird flyways converge, menorah-like, at the Mexican border into the greatest flyway of all, also the migrating Freetailed Bat & Monarch Butterfly's ancestral flyway.
Above- Peterson's first page drawing of his "Twilight Zone" in his 1960 classic A Field Guide to the Birds of Texas
How did this happen? The planet's land masses are off-kilter; Eurasia runs east-west, facilitating latitudinal diffusion of species, as Diamond notes, the American continents are Earth's great north-south dividing line, a vast hourglass landmass where, since at least the Ctretaceous, nature solved the challenge of north-south migration across broad ecological barriers by flying-as-becoming along a Great Flyway.
A welter of oddities reveals Peterson's Twilight Zone as even grander & more multi-dimensional than just birds, a global north-south swath of strangeness. This meta Twilight Zone encompasses two Tornado Alleys (a mirror-zone in South America), the most intense weather on Earth, is the major geopolitical power meridian of global war & ecological destruction, & abounds in biological freaks, including the Galapagos, folkmystic realms like Baum's Oz, Mesoamerica's very cradle, Native American sacred sites, & even Easter Island.
This Twilight Zone's fateful geography is made of shifting spheres of anomalies- atmosphere, geosphere, & biosphere, a vast hourglass landmass whose heart is a geographic singularity of weirdness centered loosely on Mexico, Breton rightly insisted, the most surreal place on Earth, thus the greatest surrealist of all, Artaud, sought the Zone to define his destiny. No wonder Bierce hereabouts disappeared without trace. Borges entered the Beast via Austin, in '61.
Rob Johnson's (UT Edinburg) reconstructed Burroughs's* "lost years" farming in South Texas & how he drew beats like Ginsburg, Cassidy, & Kerouac to Mexico (as later written up in On the Road) Turns out K freely modified reality, for example putting Bull's (WB) orgone booth in LA instead of South TX. Not long ago learned K spent five years laboring to make On the Road read like a breathless raw stream. A small coincidence- Burroughs's land seemingly is the very same land (outside Edinburg just past golf course where Trevino caddied) a piece of which my granddad Santos acquired for growing cotton, tomatoes, & peppers, a place i "helped on" & played on over several years of childhood. WB was a common type of rascal from such a time & place. Part of the coincidence with beats is that i was tapped to be Ginsberg's interpreter when he visited Vlady's vast mural project, & he sat for an oil portrait i later donated to UT, where the original manuscript of Howl ended up.
* Also resident was B's common-law wife Joan, whom he later stupidly killed playing William Tell with a handgun in MX city.
The Zone has nodes called "City of Knowledge". Currently Panama City & Monterrey claim the title but an earlier version, Burroughs'* City of Knowledge was set in South Texas as a real estate developer's fantasy promotion- "(Varied) societies prey on the pilgrims, for the area is infected with every variety of fakir & swindler...There you are in your beautiful villa, straight out of Disneyland, on a clear blue lake that drains away while you sit, with a last derisive gurgle...suuuuuugggger." Austin has become a subtler swindle of a City of Knowledge, as everything shifts North along the Zone.
* B also described the Texas Border as a place that "disoriented people...can slip into unnoticed."
Weirdness compounds where the Zone intersects major geographic east-west Twilight Zones (crosshairs considered later in this text). Ley lines were but an archeological hypothesis before the New Agers usurped them. They run between scared places like natural landmarks & ancient monuments. The Null Hypothesis asserts that ley alignments are explained by random chance. Infinite chance-space is a profound generator of meaning. You read this by incredible (im)probabilities. We explore here a multi-dimensional "ley web" of tangible facts in tangled weirdness, psychogeographic alignments, not pop-supernaturalism.
Our Twilight Zone aligns the North Pole or True North, & the North Magnetic Pole as Earth's primary geomagnetic meridian, tipping the Aurora Borealis Zoneward. The Inuit is circumpolar but the cultre is tipped toward the Zone like the Aurora, itself Inuit Oz in the sky, a higher world of stories watched on a giant plasma-screen.
The Magnetic Pole lies where Peterson's Twilight Zone pePeterson's Twilight Zone underlines the great theme of the Zone, the theme of flight, of Worlds in the Sky & secondarily, of a rich Underworld, connected by bird-man mythologies, multi navels-of-the Earth, connected by axi-mundis, tree-of-life umbilicals, across diverse cultures & vast distances.ters ;^) out, merging into an Arctic Twilight Zone of long winter night & summer day. Ironically, in the Twilight Zone, the already spooky compass reads truly without compensation. As the Magnetic Pole eventually migrates to Siberia, the New World Zone will become a tad less weird.
Extreme less-weirdness is actually a motif of The Zone, Middle American blandness sandwiched between weirdness in all directions.
Our Zone wanders along 100 degree longitudinal meridian, the standard definition of where the old frontier, the mythic "Wild West", begins, bounded by the Old Deep South. Having finished 1984, Orwell was headed here as untimely death overtook him. Writers can't help pick up the Oz-like theme. Nobelist Lederman posed a relativistic thought experiment as a road trip to Omaha, in his words a "...pretty bizarre nightmare...out of the classic...Twilight Zone series." Writer, Mark Svenvold chased tornado chasers into The Zone, then followed the axis-of-weirdness south, & must nod reading all this.
The Zone includes Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island. Archeology warns us how the island crashed its ecology just as we are. The great medicine wheels of the Great Plains Native Americans align north-south with Rapa Nui's colossal sculptures, not to mention some of Mesoamerica's mightiest monuments.
The ~100° Zone also aligns closely with the Galapagos, where evolution, in weirdness, revealed itself to Darwin, revolutionizing biology (incredible that Darwin met with the elderly legend, intellectual Simon Roderiguez, just before the sail leg to the Galpagos, like touching base with Yoda before the final quest). But the Galapagos part of the Zone wasn't done with revolution- Plucky little Alvin, quintessential Yellow Submarine, made its greatest discovery here, a New World of undersea vents, "black smokers" with a totally unsuspected realm of life running in darkness on heat & sulphur that, yet again, revolutionized biology.
Axis of Good & Evil
The ranch of the, i kid you not, World Dictator (Oz's hapless wizard?), the "Western White House", is perhaps the creepiest spot on The Zone, a troubled heartland where global war is born.* He scares us. Close by is Fort Hood, global base of real-world Imperial Storm-Troopers. Fr om space Ft. hood is a vast grey scar on the land, supposed preserve for the endangered black-capped vireo. Even closer to the Bush ranch- Waco (yes, that Waco).
* "It was here (Crawford) that Bush met with his closest allies and aides and developed plans for the war." Waco Tribune May 28,'06
The scandal of Abu Graib began in Texas, where prison guards mastered their sadistic craft. If Texas were a country, it would have the highest incarceration rate in the world, the legacy of bad schools (the poor), slavery (Blacks), genocide (Native Americans), & ethnic cleansing (Mexicans). The Zone is dotted with Supermax prisons, willful tombs-of-hopelessness for the human spirit, in tribute to a wrathful god.
Follow the "fine" highways north, lined as they are with crash victim memorials & slaughtered Bambis. The Romans festooned roads with crucified humans to achieve a similar effect, for lack of cars. Follow the Zone north to where H-bomb warheads are built, then further along to where the ICBMs are assembled in Columbine (yes, that Columbine), to arrive most finally at the missile fields poised to end higher life on the planet. Shoot-first mythology was born here & endures as First-Strike capability. Small wonder that Kennedy was picked-off on the Zone. Welcome to the graves of empires.
Keepin' it (Un)Real
The Twilight Zone welcomed The Master when Borges first landed in Babylon via, where else, Austin, a prime node of the Twilight Zone wher i was born & am based still. As a native i didn't need the homing instinct of Borges, Bierce, Orwell, or Artuad. Pa was born along the Zone to the north (Mineral Wells) & ma on it to the south (Edinburg), both on Highway 281, the Zone's bisector.
Austin's new official motto is "Keep it Weird", replacing an older informal motto, "Onward, thru the Fog." This is Middle Earth, the Eye-of-the-Redneck-Hurricane, ubercool Slacker Homeland, but its not all-good in the Shire, where the first modern celebrity mass-murderer, Charles Whitman, shot forty-eight pedestrians with a deer rifle from the University of Texas Tower in '66. Survivor R. Kelly's take- "[Like a] horrific..Twilight Zone...that never goes away...etched in my brain." AAS, Aug., 2006
1984, no shit, saw the beginnings of Cyc AI project, humanity's quest for Hal, co-opted as TIA (Total Information Awareness) before disappearing into the satanic NSA.
Once an Earthly Paradise of mighty oaks & cold springs, The Shire, that natural Austin is dying, despite all the neoliberal eco-yuppies, world take note.
Aerial Paradise?
Heaven & Hell in the Sky
"Texas is known as the single best location in the world for cross country and competition flying for hang gliders, paragliders and sailplanes... where the most prestigious ... World Records have been set."
Davis Straub, Oz Report (that Oz?)
Peterson's Twilight Zone underlines the great theme of the Zone, the theme of flight, of Worlds in the Sky & secondarily, of a rich Underworld, connected by bird-man mythologies, multi navels-of-the Earth, connected by axi-mundis, tree-of-life umbilicals, across diverse cultures & vast distances.
The soaring records are made on a northward track along The Zone. Nevermind the modern bird flyway, for at least 100 million years this land has been the planet's great fly-zone, since the Cretaceous. The region poduced the only known fossils of great Quetzalcoatlus, the grandest pterosaur, are found, a true dragon with a business jet wingspan (+12m), soaring the same skies where the modern soaring community sets its world records.
The ominous "Birth of Military Flight" took place outside San Antonio with the original aircraft type, the Wright Flyer. A few years later Pancho Villa, a typical phantom of The Zone, easily evaded the primitive aircraft of the first U.S. Air Force squadron. In Fort Worth, just north of Bush's ranch, vast production of fighter/bombers continues that, as this is keyboarded, are bombing Lebanese civilians with cluster bombs & phosphorus.
The Zone annually hosts the greatest gatherings of aircraft ever. Every year Oshkosh's great fly-in is the busiest airport in history, more aircraft than four continents crowd one spot, verily aviation's Woodstock, but not just once, but again & again & bigger & bigger. The event is hosted by the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA), folks so skilled they design, build, & fly their own aircraft. Its a week of Utopia. Did someone say OZkosh? The scale of Oshosh & its location along The Zone are no fluke. Due south, during the Viet Nam war, the busiest airport in the world then was the training base for helicopter pilots at Mineral Wells.
* How "inhumanly self-reliant" was the old school Texas aviator? A friend of the family , Roy Taylor, had a dad, Roy Senior, who once was flying with a non-pilot friend in an early airplane. Suddenly the engine just fell clean off & the totally imbalanced plane began to flutter & spin uncontrollably to earth. Roy Sr. simply climbed out the door & onto the empty nose, using his bearish bulk to balance the airframe, shouting instructions to the sudden pilot, who thus managed to land safely (Yawn). The Twilight Zone didn't claim Roy Sr. that day, but waited till much later, when Old Roy was already in his heaven, fishing Mecca Lake Guerrero, within sight of The Eye in El Diente, near Ciudad Victoria, a heart-node of The Zone described below.
The Zone to the south annually hosts the greatest concentration of migrating raptors anywhere, soaring kettles of hawks & buzzards numbering in the hundreds of thousands, another flying Woodstock.
Con-trails scrawled across the sky delineate "demonic" power meridians, vaporous lines said by Tribal Elders to be the spider-web in-the-sky of Hopi Prophecy that presages the apocalyptic Fourth Shaking of the World. The heart of the world's busiest jet network is defined by a triangle of the SuperHubs- DFW Airport, Chicago's O'Hare, & Denver's Airport.
When we are in the Sierra Madre Oriental wilderness there our most common neighbors are folks passing a few km. overhead, north& south along The Zone, sipping cocktails. High over Austin one sees east-west trails of LA/etc. to Miami/etc..
The Zone were Forth Worth Star Telegram once sponsored world record endurance flights, Wiley Post, literal Cyclops discovered the Jet Stream. The World Record Encampment, in Zapata, Texas; all on the same line as Quetzalcoatalis!
The Air Force Academy lies in the SuperHub triangle, where the young raptors, neobirdmen of Global Air Superiority fledge. General Aviation's greatest graveyard is located in The Zone outside Wichita, Kansas, where the most light airplanes over decades (Cessna). Houston Mission Control, from where so much historic space flight was/is directed, while not quite on the centerline falls in The Zone.
A true nightmare has beauty & innocence trapped in it. The Zone is Beauty's prison camp.
Giants & Dwarfs abounding in The Zone- supercell storms with cat 5 tornados
Goliaths of the Zone- Big Tex- ethnic cleanser, the "Tall Texan" myth, Texas itself- the big state, high-heeled boots, beehive hairdos, giant sombreros & ten-gallon hats, bigger trucks, bigger guns, megaobesity. Paul Bunyan- ecocriminal, extinct megafauna, Mexican pyramids the most massive of ancient monuments,
Rapa Nui's palm-trees were the biggest palms on the planet, up to 2m thick, now extinct. The world's greatest tree, in mass & girth, a Montezuma Cypress outside of Oaxaca is a Twilight Zone native. Many notable trees are, like Treaty Oak in Austin, half killed by poison in a satanic ritual, then saved by a heroic effort funded by Ross Perot & Michael Jackson..
Dwarves of The Zone- invention of integrated circuit by Kilby at TI. The SCSC, if it had been built, would have revealed the smallest scales ever probed. Munchkins, Mayan poltergeists, moral dwarves of every kind, prison cells as smallest human spaces, most native huts were rather spacious.
Google: Your search - "Birdman Worlds - did not match any documents
Strange manifestation of lake based yacht clubs in semi arid continental interior.
lapsing into mad obsession- Zone spelled backwards is French for "in Oz" (En Oz), the letter Z, reversed & superposed onself as Oz itself, according to Baum, is, forms an houglass, the black widow's Red Letter (a Scarlet Letter)
A true Tree of Life is a living axis mundi manifested, in this part of the world, as a widely-spaced isolated perennial giant rainforest parrot tree, festooned with epiphytes, monkeys, & serpents, a living apartment tower, its roots in the planetary heart, at its top Kinich Kakmo, great macaw as sun-god incarnate. Mayoids knew where in their own backyard the axis mundi grew.
These axes mundis orthogonally complete the roving crosses of E-W & N-S twilight zones. & carry the Mayan serpent current along the dragon path to The White Road, our Milky Way.
Reverberating hall-of-mirrors echoing with meanings. What is the opposite point, in the Northern Hemisphere, from the proposed singularity the bike nomads found? Hmmm, let me check, Benares! The Hindu Holy Capital reflected in Indra's Web. The mirror Twilight Zone clips Tibet, runs thru Siberian shaman land &, to the south, runs across where Steiner imagined Lemuria sank. Permian boundary Siberian Traps & Yucatan KT crater, the two grand extinction events of the last few hundred million years line up along the N-S gedesic.
The prehistoric Bird-Man motif is found all along The Twilight Zone, from Rapa Nui & Mesoamerica to Inuit Canadian Arctic, as are shut-in cults of light-deprived shamans (the Inuit had only to pass winter for the same effect), earnest Crazy Horse/Black Elk Vision-Questers, etc. Modern airman as incarnate birdman at the verge of mystical fulfillment (link to Natural Aviation page)
Huracan, Mayan god of monstrous vorticity, the milky way somehow perceived as a great cosmic whirlpool resembling nothing more than a hurricane as seen from space. Central America is the one place smashed by both Pacific typhoons & Atlantic hurricanes; contending realms that up-continent spawn the great tornados.
Crucero de Todo, a hyper-dimensional ground zero, psychogeographic cross hairs
Mesomania, the party at the center of things, a hyper-dimensional implosion with a flowery rebound.
ecotones, politones, ethnitones, etc..
Multiple native "Navels of the Earth" along the Zone, the Black Hills, Rapa Nui, Teotihuacàn, axis mundi, a cosmic umbilical cord, the sacred tree of life, magic mountains like Enchanted Rock, El Diente, Big Horn, Devils Tower, El Popo, One could go on. Volcanos as world belly button, the galactic singularity hidden in the Milky Way's great rift
A cave, as far as light enters, is called by speleology its "twilight zone". As paleolithic "cave-men", we evolved in such twilight. Canyon depths, forest shade, & such are twilit. The mesopelagic zone of the world's oceans is the "twilight zone" of oceanographers.
The twilight zones of childhood & senescence both lie between life & death, zones between ignorance & knowledge, twilight revealment fronts between ignorance & knowledge
Gasp, i've overlooked the Mother-of-all Twilight Zones, the lovely eternally moving circular ribbon of twi-lit sunset & sunrise over the spinning planet. With the changing seasons this zone tips from one cardinal diagonal (NW-SW or NE-SW), thru the equinox, straight-up N-S, to the other diagonal, drawing an hourglass over every point, each day's diagonal fresh synchronization of dusk & dawn over global scale geodesics. Thus, at a given time of year you share the magical twilight moment with all the points within the hourglass zone at which you are the center. Hmmm. Such synchronization of cosmic light necessary entrains many other things, such as the human consciousness of sunset/rise lovers & astronomers.
Weird east-west Twilight Zones crossing the great north-south zone
Houdini criss-crossed it. Granny D tracked Eastward, Coronado walked the reciprocal. The space shuttle streaks over Central Texas on landing approach to Cape Canaveral, where Columbia burned up over the Western White House, verily upon the cross of north-south/east-west power meridians.
European settlers loosely arranged by latitude- Nords to the north, then Scotts, Normans, Celts, Iberians, Canary Islanders proceeding South.
Here holarctic collides with neotropic, as Hadley & Ferrell cells roil over the Tropic of (skin)Cancer, the Sun's very limit. The north-south Twilight Zone Tornado Alley crossing, unmarked, the Hurricane Railroad along its east-west Twilight Zone. Jet streams, trades
The militarized yet invincibly porous international border chafes over a hallucined history-scape. There is a state-less free-space at center of international bridges, embedded tiny twilight zones within The Zone, where people reunite, party, & exchange things eerily free of domination. For decades the Kickapoos lived in cardboard & reed wickyups under the Eagle Pass Bridge. Kickapoos as masters of the Twilight Zone, ranging freely from Mexico to Canada, their prophet long ago taught them how to dodge, mongoose-like, the white man's genocidal ways.
This line is the fuzzy yet real northern biological frontier of things south, such as monkeys & macaws, & southern frontier of northern things like bald eagles & buffalos.
On this line northern alligators give way to southern crocodiles. I have been trying to locate the precise frontier by a Mexican herpetologist's request (Oscar), but the border biologists & wildlife rangers consulted so far don't know. Very little is sharply defined in The Zone. One report puts crocs in Lake Falcon, right on the border.
The latitude of Cd. Victoria is considered the Mesoamerican Frontier, the northern limit of large pre-Hispanic city-states. Global warming is shifting the Mesoamerican socio-ecological Twilight Zone north, close to San Antonio & Austin. White flight has flown South Texas; the Gringo's southern limit is shifting north, while Vasconceloid Mestizos march north into the vacuum.
N-S Twilight Zone additions- Waco Branch Davidians, Profiles International, Fort Hood, & Bush, all on one node.
find out more about when Houdini (Born, Wisconsin, on The Zone, natch) came besides El Paso, what track?
Knowledge Twilights of uncertainty & incompleteness.
Texas is a land not so much empty as it is spaced-out.
Texas, home of the Big Lie, the quaint "tall tale" covering for something evil, the Orwellian falsification of a criminal history by suave suited rednecks.
The Rockies Front range starkly delineates the Twilight Zone even as it eventually veers Northwest to define the "hourglass" wall (see below). The Sierra Madre Oriental is a great question mark as seen from space.
Here the intercontinental land-bridge is deeply pinched. Pacific & Atlantic weather systems clash here with equalized effect, the nearby Gulf balanced over the spine of the Sierra Madre against a more remote yet greater Pacific.
The Gulf has a clockwise gyre current that runs north along an unusual straight stretch of tex-mex coast, perfectly aligned with the Twilight Zone. The western edge of the great Bermuda High spins the same direction, combined as a great engine pumping moisture & heat far north. Neotropical balm flows north as far as Canada in summer.
merry meridians of mystery
Ghost Fire on Enchanted Rock- Observing buoyant luminous plasmas was a fairly common experience to ancient outdoor peoples, now with air & light pollution plus indoor lifestyle, people locked away from diverse mysteries. "Sprites" flashing above super-cell storms are a similar phenomenon.
riparian conduits across ecotones
high disruption, relentless selection alongside endemic preservation
twilight ecotone as love zone or killing field
Conjecture to Deutsche- A crude cloud chamber placed across the intended beam of the Twilight Zone's seemingly defunct Super-Conducting Super-Collider (SCSC) might seethe & sputter with anomalous interaction trails from those parallel universes where the SCSC actually got built. Deutsche says "Unfortunately, no." i'm pushing a specialized anthropic conjecture, that better physicists in parallel worlds will might more than meet us half way if we monitor legendary physics sites as attractors.
Same old story, you've entered the Twilight Zone, unknowing, then the shock. Entered the Double Zone, double shock. Triple Twilight, too much! But that's what we've got here.
Polar freeze alternates with baking drought or rain all at once, the most violent weather, yet life-giving & full of exceptions, refuges & traps, microhabitats, sheer size & the capricious spottiness of fate
Mesomania
The manic historian, Arcinegas, saw in Caribbean & Gulf a New World Mediterranean, where one may further posit, en el "Seno Mexicano", a New World Holy Land, laid out in bilateral inkblot symmetry unfolded from the SubAtlantic Ridge.
Mountain mirrors valley, Continental Divide to the West, Mississippi Valley (negative divide) to the East. The delineating the Twilight Zone between.
atmosphere mirrors ocean, & cosmos balanced on earth's core.
the "Coahuilan Peninsula" a set of valleys & passes into the Sierra Madre Oriental, as small inverted mirror opposite to Yucatan. Pen-insular-ity, ni'er island, nor mainland, a bay or sideways mountain, void on 3 sides, void geophallic impregnate, as is Yucatan, Spain, Korea, or Malay.
Metaphor itself is superposed or bilateral symmetric pattern matching across dimensions. To Lamborn-Wilson's hermetic formula "as below, so above", may be added "as inner so outer", "as ahead so behind", "as on one side so the other", & so on. Geographic patterns resist great global asymmetries; the arrow of gravity, eastward spin of tilted axis, vast cosmic impacts, & the delayed human settlement of the New World.
Predictably, then, this mirror Holy Land, the Chihuahuan Triangle with criss-crossed Twilight Zones at its heart, is also divine nursery where the Pecos River Shaman school endured millennia, where Quetzalcoatl landed, & Cabeza de Vaca shipwrecked & became a healer, where the most renowned such healer, Nino Fidencio, was born, & Santa Teresita Urrea migrated to.
Here passels of divine rug-rats, niños santos, & divers narco/wetback patron saints thrive, NeoCatholic Aztec revivals like Santa Muerte, proliferate; home-brewed, newly minted, or dug up, Popeless; but where the false spirituality of Inquisition fizzled, graveyard of that empire. The New World Garden of Eden never died, it persists on the neotropic frontier as the "Lomas de Shangri-La", aka the Reserva Biosfera El Cielo (RBC).
the other meridian where East also meets West, the Gulf of Mexico as a sort of Indian Ocean pattern as well,
The line 'tween cowboy & buckaroo runs north & south with The Zone, & 'tween them & vaquero runs west & east & these lines also follow the crossed Twilight Zones
The cowboy myth born of working vaquero, roughly mirrored by Mongolia, true original horseman, the global country redneck sharing common icons; the pick-up, rifle, rooster, cattle, & horse; even sharing "country music" across every cultural divide. Similar superposition is seen as SE Asian water folk settle the North American Gulf Coast.
Here the Gulf Gyre aligns with Bermuda High anticyclone, both headed north, crossing the tropic-of-skin-cancer along a strangely straight stretch of North-South coast, a perfect cross as seen from space, as if space aliens could contrive no clearer sign to make the whistle-blowers seem mad.
AntiMirror- a Borges-like reflection of the opposite of a given object, with a non-twist of same handedness.
Geography of Oz- accessed via sky (cyclone or LTA) or earth (Nome Kingdom underground), reversed east & west, diagonal state boundaries, refugees from Kansas, Nebraska, & Colorado. "over-the-rainbow" uncertainty, an arc from NW to NE, where compass unreliable both in Oz & at Magnetic Pole. Baum lived in South Dakota, steeped in The Zone.
Bousky points out that in the Hebrew words for the tree of life, otz chaim, [can] be spelled as Oz
Padre Island as longest (barrier) island in the world proportional to its width, almost two hundred miles long & less than a mile across over much of its length, curiously mirrored by my congressman's unprecedented gerrimandered district (see below). The two Laguna Madres also the biggest in the world, part of the most diverse set of geographic types in the smallest area, anywhere. Look at a composite satellite view of the whole world, & you can see this weirdness at a glance.
137 miles of limestone sediments, karst parsed as Book-of-Life, near the singularity
Alan Lomax- preserver of world music, born in Meridian, .
The inverted triangular inland sea called the cretaceous seaway neatly fits the great continental hourglass footprint, with famed elusive Northwest Passage as top line (with El Niño current & mighty Amazon as bottom line). Map of Oz shows the hourglass's diagonal borders clearly as the realms of the Good Witches of north & south.
corn as world tree variety, birth of corn in Oaxaca (world's major crop), Scrambled genetics- neat if corn's polyploidy caused by cosmic ray, polyploidy favored in extremes of cold or heat, consistent with Mesoamerican mythology. The fractured underworld of Amazon Mollies (Poecilia) a female only cave minnow with extra chromozone sets.
Abstract Vaquero made of high mathematics- mexican hat function, plus saddle function, plus knot & string theory (lariat).
mosaic of disturbance & preservation regimes in close proximity
Twilight Zone Monsters & Magical Creatures along the Rio Grande Border
This corner of the world was long depicted on maps by monsters at the very edge of reality (the early maps were highly psychogeographic). Imaginary creatures proliferated as true monsters (holocene megafauna) go extinct.
Land of Chimeras- Jackelope is well known to gringos. El Alabrije of the central Mexican altiplano, a colorful neotropical chimera, has been radiating north along souvenir trails. Pecos Bill as uncorked jinn successfully re-released into the wild by Robin Williams. The Neotropic Mexican Tooth Rat is found in the same ecological niche as the Holarctic Tooth Fairy, coexisting along the big holarctic-neotropic ecotone The Mexican Bean Elf, El Duende Frijolin, employed as a well-known trademark, relic of ice age populations, now extinct in the wild. El Chapulin Colorado still thrives in syndication,in another guise the Mexican Bee Guy as seen on the Simpsons. Speedy Gonzales was considered extinct but has been spotted on KAZI, the Frito Bandido is considered extinct. La Llorona is an endemic riparian specialist not considered endangered..The garriffigaffa, a griffinoid of the chaparal, is endemic to the lower Rio Grande & highly endangered. El Chupa Cabra, a neotropic escapee of Puerto Rico, mildly invasive, but declining of late. Mescalito occurs here at his western range limit, in increasing numbers. El Nagual also occurs.
The notorius Texas Gerrymander Possibly extinct. My own Austin congressional district, uberliberal Rep. Dogget's the most notorious in the nation, stretchng from Austin southward, yes, along the Twilight Zone all the way to the border. As this is written it was just killed by federal court. Below, the yellow (-dog) zone (Dogget-25) created by DeLay depicts the creature-
Bicycle Superheroes are found here at the southern limits of their normal range, with some strays occurring further south. Cyclowns originated in Austin, evolved along the border, becoming invasive world-wide. Li'l Chess Monsters of Brownsville give rich-kid chess teams serious conniptions at the nationals.
The paunchy Mexican Wrestler superhero is quite common, Superbarrio, a famous social activist subspecies. The Filosofo de Guemez is a thriving local endemic fo Tamaulipas. Crypto-Bros, the earlist Spaniards to sail past the Rio Grande Delta claimed to have seen a band of Africans there. The seeming Afro features of colossal Olmec Heads remain unexplained.
Strong illusion fields promote peception of Gulf manatees as mermaids. Imaginary Bugs crawl over one's skin, after you've left certain places, like the El Cielo Bioreserve. Several species occur of true or mimic blue-birds-of-happiness, but precise classification is disputed by the unhappy folks who quibble over such trifles.
The True Dragon, with the wingspan of a business jet, occurred here in the late cretaceous as pterodactyl quetzalcoatlus, now reported in a ghost form in South Texas by supposed reliable winesses like a policeman & a group of school teachers. The True Vampire, a blood lapping bat, occurs here, but mostly just bothers cattle. Poe's Raven (Corvus corax) strays here. In principle, Zapata's White Horse, connsidered immortal, might be spotted anytime in the Sierra Madre. The "continental reptile" & rabbit-in-the-moon are the largest imaginary creatures short of cosmological constellations.
El Cuco- the devil occurs in many phitotypes, much classification work remains. La Negra Neutron evolved by accident as this report was compiled, by mis-hearing an informant list the Mexican superheroes El Neutron & El Aguila Negra. She is endemic to Memo's house. El Santo was also cited, a sort of secular Catholic superhero. La Mano Pachona is a severed Mexican hand that crawls about autonomously. La Araña Peluda is common in its giant tarantula guise. The Perro Negro de Don Julian is a very bad dog, a red-eyed Mexican variant of the Texas glowing green-eyed monster-dog Ben Anglin, a childhood friend, described to me.
A steady background of Mexican UFOs sightings link up with hotspots such as the Marfa lights in Texas & Roswell, New Mexico. Don Nicolas' tiny UFOs around Jimenez, the old man is quite insistent.
The Mexican Bigfoot (blush) is me (see pic & story below).
