The Post Oak Savannah is an ecological region in Texas, a relatively narrow section of sandy soil prairie stretching from near Dallas south to Interstate 10. Early settlers described the savannah as a “vast endless sea of grasses and wildflowers with sparsely scattered trees or mottes of oaks on uplands.” White-tailed deer, wild turkey, bison, black bear, squirrel, mountain lion, and red wolf were once common in the Post Oak Savannah.

When cattle ranching came to Texas, Native American management of the savannah using prescribed burning and bison herds disappeared, and the savannah’s oak understory has become overgrown and clogged, primarily with yaupon, scientifically known as ilex vomitoria, a native shrub in the holly family that grows to a dense forest-choking thicket, and eastern red cedar, a dark evergreen sometimes referred to as a Texas Christmas tree. And it’s not that these dense areas are unattractive – far from it, they are deep and beautiful – but they are not open, golden, beckoning, savannah. Almost three years ago I purchased 100 acres of heavily wooded land in the Post Oak Savannah. And while there are a few spots on my land where glimpses of the legendary sea of grasses and oaks are possible, much work will be required to completely restore that lost landscape.

Richard Louv, the author of Last Child in the Woods, a lauded book about the harmful effects of the disappearance of nature from our children’s lives, spoke here a few weeks ago. He discussed a survey in which people of different nationalities were shown photos of different landscapes, and were asked to identify their favorites. The landscape that was most universally appealing to the most people, the one photo that was most picked as a favorite, was a photo of a savannah, a grassland of intermittent trees. Louv speculates that humans maintain an evolutionary affinity for our original birthplace as a species, thought to be grassland savannahs in Africa. The Texas savannah, along with other portions of the Great Plains, once represented the North American analog of those African homelands. Those of us who are trying to save what’s left and bring back what’s gone, are therefore operating out of a deeply held – indeed, a genetically programmed – human impulse for savannah and its bounty of grasses, meadows, shade trees, arable soil, and bird and wildlife. In short, a Garden of Eden, a paradise.

A taste of autumn arrived this past week, and at my ranch those areas where the savannah has been recently restored flashed their beauty, and it was indeed a paradise. Native tall grasses, especially little bluestem, waved golden and blood russet in the dry breezes, and the leaves on the post oaks towering above the grassland rustled and were beginning their annual turn to copper. Looking at the landscape, I saw an earlier era in Texas. One of my joys is to crank up the chainsaw, and go into the forest to battle the yaupon and cedar in an attempt to gradually bring back the Post Oak Savannah. And on Sunday, my little daughter and I went off deep down a trail to find a tree I’d been meaning to remove, a twenty foot tall eastern red cedar grown up right between two taller post oaks. I don’t mind cedar at all, in some places it makes a fine shade tree, but not right between two mature oaks on land to which you’re trying to restore savannah. I sat her on a log at a safe distance and approached the victim.

Tree felling is not as straightforward as it seems. You don’t just start on one side at the bottom and cut a straight line until the saw comes out the other. For one thing, the weight of the tree will soon pinch and trap your saw in the cut. For another, using that method you wouldn’t have any idea which direction the tree is going to fall, including the spot where you are standing. Instead, you first make a wide open notch on the side of the tree to which you want the tree to fall. Next, you make a horizontal cut on the opposite backside from the notch, being careful not to cut all the way through and leaving a strip of fiber remaining as the hinge to guide the tree safely to the ground. Hopefully, the tree will begin to fall in the direction of the notch. At least that’s the idea. And yet on this particular cedar, after doing these textbook things, the tree leaned only a bit and stopped. I looked up. Thick greenbriar vine had grown up along the oaks and now held the crown of the cedar in place, like a giant bug in a spider web. I gave the cedar a little shove in back, but it wouldn’t go over. I looked at the notch in front and saw that it had closed down some, but could stand to be widened more. It’s not exactly textbook, returning to make a second cut at the notch. But I decided to do it. I knelt down, I widened the notch, and then I sensed the tree closing slightly on the saw and I had an immediate concern that the saw was becoming pinched, it was slightly stuck, and I gave a strong pull. In the blink of an eye, out the saw came, coming, coming, it wouldn’t stop, and then suddenly I felt something contact my lower leg. I stopped moving, the saw stopped moving, everything stopped moving. Silence. My mind said something like: “Is what just happened what I think just happened?” And then it was time to look down. At the leg. My leg. There, two inches below the knee, a glistening red and white long and wide fleshy split in my body, dripping crimson trails into my socks. It’s bad, not good at all. Can I stand? Yes. Can I walk? Yes. Can I talk? “Sweetheart” I call to my daughter, whose happy universe had now become a major concern, “we’re going to leave now. We’re going to go back and see Mama at the house.” “What happened Dada?” “Nothing, we’re just going to go back now.” I moved quickly to her and swept her up in my left arm while carrying the chainsaw in my right. I certainly wasn’t going to leave it there despite the emergency. After all, the thing cost $300, and what had happened wasn’t its fault.

Back at the house I called out to my wife. “I’ve had an accident. I need the first aid kit. Get the kids ready to go. We’ve got to go to a hospital.” She looked at my leg and turned white. Decision time. Which hospital. Here in the country or an hour away back in Houston. I went to the bathroom, and ran water over this ugly thing. Somehow, almost miraculously, the bleeding was already stopping. We had good bandages, antibiotic ointment, a big sterile trauma pad, plenty of gauze and medical tape. I wrap the dressings in place, and we leave. I decide we’re going back home to Houston, Hannah will drop me at the emergency room and take the kids home. On the way home, my daughter thankfully still seems mostly unaware of what has happened. We laugh a little and she eats some bunny crackers and falls asleep. While Hannah drives 80 I call our friend Dr. K. for help on getting help. Though she’s on vacation in Florida, she listens to me describe the accident and the wound and advises me to go to the hospital where she treats patients and which is near our house. She says she’ll call ahead and have them get ready. When we arrive an hour later, they’re ready, but not as ready as I would like. I sit outside the emergency room area and fill out all my paperwork and information for the admitting clerk. He says it’ll be about 20 minutes as another patient has just arrived by ambulance. I limp over to the waiting area and watch the New England Patriots play some football against the Dallas Cowboys. Someone is lying in the middle of the field with a hurt leg, and the trainers are attending to him.

I’m finally admitted. The nurse takes my vital signs and tells me Doctor B., the emergency room attending physician, will be in shortly. I ask how many chainsaw accidents they get in here. He can’t think of any, it’s mostly heart attacks and ongoing ailments. Dr. B. arrives and cuts off my bandages. He frowns. It’s ok I tell him, I’m not having any trouble walking so there’s no broken bone, I think it just needs to be sewn up. Dr. B. looks at me, and begins to discuss the potential for infection from the saw, we’ll need antibiotics, a tetanus shot, some x-rays to make sure the bone wasn’t hit, a cleaning kit, and we may have to call in Dr. M., the head of surgery who is at home. Now I’m frowning. All of this activity for my careless and unsafe operation of a chainsaw. Dr. B. first squirts the wound with a steady jet of cold peroxide, then he takes a syringe and begins to inject local anesthetic all around the wound. Up to now, the pain has been manageable, even minor, but now I find myself growling, gritting my teeth, breathing deep, forcefully squeezing the assistant’s hand as Dr. B. jabs that thing all around, injecting. Pretty quickly, though, it’s totally numb down there and I feel terrific, like I’m ready to hop off the table and run home. Now he’s cleaning the wound with rubber gloved hands, removing dried blood, loose tissue, patches of who knows what. With all of this miasma and gore gone, the extent of the wound becomes clear. It looks, really, like a shark bite. Dr. B. decides it’s necessary after all to call Dr. M. for a phone consultation while I’m carted off on the gurney for X rays. Back in the room, the x rays are thrown up on the light board. Dr. B. moves in close for a look: there’s a little nick on the front of the shinbone, not much at all, but there it is. Is that good, a little nick? Is that bad, a little nick? I don’t know, and Dr. B. has left the room. The nurse comes in and puts a tetanus shot in my arm, ouch, and then a massive syringe of antibiotic in my butt, oh my GOD does that hurt! Now we wait for Dr. M., the head of surgery. It’s about 5 pm on Sunday. The Patriots are playing the Cowboys. And I’ve chainsawed my own leg.

I fall asleep and am awakened by the sound of Dr. M.’s entry. Handsome, in his mid-40’s, dressed in jeans, a sport shirt, five o’clock shadow and casual loafers with no socks, his lab coat on, Dr M. looks at the X ray first and then removes the gauze now covering the wound. He begins issuing orders for supplies immediately: “Suture kit, bandages.” I start talking about how careless I feel but how quickly it happened, he says I’m lucky that the saw didn’t go farther into the bone (no kidding) or it would have been a different story, he’s going to sew it up but we have to watch for infection. He checks to see if Dr. B.’s local anesthetic is still going strong, poking around the wound, do I feel that? That? How about that? No. Nothing, I feel nothing. Dr. M. begins to sew black plastic sutures into my skin using some kind of J-shaped fishhook. As he weaves, we talk, I apologize for dragging him out on a Sunday, he says no big deal the only thing he’s missing is the Patriots-Cowboys game, he says the minute they told him it’s a chainsaw accident he figured he’d better come in, he describes his own recent mishap falling from a balcony that resulted in two broken heels, a compressed vertebra, and a fractured hand. I guess that makes me feel better, it can happen to anyone, even the head of surgery. I watch as he works, that gaping trench in my leg gradually being pulled closed by his hand stitching. Truly, Dr. M.’s work is fantastic, obviously the result of long practice and extraordinary skill. As he finishes I move in close to look. It’s closed, and it looks about as good as such a thing can possibly look, certainly a dramatic improvement from the gaping wound of only a few moments before. He prescribes some pills and wants to see me on Thursday, this afternoon, after my radio show.

On that same day, today, the Congress of the United States will take a vote to override President Bush’s veto of the recent upgrade of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. This program is designed to provide health insurance for children whose parents earn too much money for them to receive Medicaid, but too little to be able to afford private health insurance, and Democrats are trying to increase the income limits to admit more children into the program since more children than ever before are now uninsured in our country. The money that is under consideration is in the tens of billions of dollars. While this is a lot of money, it is a small fraction of what the President and the Congress have authorized for the appalling and disastrous war in Iraq. Still, the President argues that it’s too much money, and that the proposed modifications to this successful program will further push the United States towards fiscal irresponsibility and socialized medicine, which he regards as some kind of evil. As a taxpayer, however, I have decided that I want my money to stop going to the war in Iraq and all of the other nonsense that George Bush sees value in, and to instead go to children whose parents are unable to afford health insurance for them.

One of the things that makes savannah unique is that it sponsors so many different types of wildlife: insects, mammals, grasses and trees, amphibians, birds of all stripes, humans - savannah makes room and provides care, livelihood, and shelter to all, young and old, large and small, alike. So it should be with our health care system: a broad, verdant savannah that provides care for all, including the most helpless among us. If the President doesn’t agree, perhaps he can be persuaded with a chainsaw to his leg combined with an ominous, silent refusal to treat his wound by the extraordinarily talented and dedicated doctors of our nation.

I’m Leo Gold. This is The New Capital Show.