The sign on the tree did not lie and it did not elaborate. It said wear your shoes and it meant it. This was Sovereignty Ranch, outside of Bandera, and the ground here made its own rules. The fire ants worked like snipers, and they were patient the way only small things with bad intentions can be patient. The thorns lay in the grass and waited. Back home on 33rd and L the ground was sand, and the Gulf was capricious. Some days it lapped the shore without ambition. Other days it crashed against the pier and did not apologize for it. It depended on the swells out in the open water and no two days were the same. The island asked nothing of your feet. The ranch asked everything.

 Our friends had come to this land and decided to stay. They wanted to farm it the way it was meant to be farmed, to return to the earth what the earth was owed and to feed people from what came back. Adi and I drove out from Galveston to help, and we did not come for wages. We came because some things are worth doing without being asked twice. In three weeks, Confluence would begin on these same 200 acres. More than a thousand people would come from across the country because not long ago they had been told to stay inside and to fear one another, and they had remembered something older and truer than any of that and they were not going to forget it again. The land would receive all of them and vibrate with each soul, the way a tuning fork finds its pitch and holds it until everything nearby begins to hum at the same frequency. Both places told the truth. You just had to know how to listen.