Sunflowers, Enchanted Rock, and High School Latin

Look at the size of those sunflowers.

Higher than my sweet wife’s head. Bigger around than a serving platter. Trouble is, the dazzling yellow field of giant flowers were growing in Germany, not Texas. But we have them, too. I’ve seen other dazzling fields of blooming sunflowers in the Rio Grande valley, within a few miles of the Mexican-US border. They are a cash crop for their oil, and the seeds are sold in little plastic sacks at gas station stores for nibbling.

Sunflowers apparently were ‘discovered’ in the 1500’s by early European explorers as crops grown by Native Americans living in the southwest. Archeologists date Native American use of sunflower seeds to 3,000 B.C. Folks, that’s Babylonian and Egyptian kingdom era, when Europe was still a howling wilderness.

The explorers ‘exported’ seeds and plants back to Europe where they became an agricultural success, but were ignored by the colonists in North America. It wasn’t until the 1800’s that seeds from Europe were brought back to the New World and joined the agricultural economy of European-Americans.

So what do huge sunflowers have to do with my novels?  Just this: My Texas horny-toad-dragon character needs an alternate food source if she is going to co-exist with the settlers of Central Texas in the 1840’s. She can’t just eat every settler’s cows and horses, and she hasn’t got the knack for noodling big catfish out of the rivers. I can’t say I’ll turn the dear dragon into a Vegan, oh no. But there’s a dragon-related place in this story for mammoth sunflowers. You’ll see.

I just wrote a segment in A Different Dragon Entirely  that takes place on and near Enchanted Rock in the Texas Hill Country. Here’s a photo of that remarkable huge hunk of stone  that is now a popular state park. For a sense of scale, those are full-grown oak trees around the base of the knob, not little shrubs. Crabapple Creek flows hidden under the trees. In real frontier history, a solitary Texas Ranger named Jack Hays held off an all-day Comanche attack from his hidey-hole on top of Enchanted Rock. He survived by virtue of having two Colt revolvers and lots of lead and powder.

Finally, I’m proud to show you my ‘bonafides’ for using Latin as the language telepathically linking the two main characters A Different Dragon Entirely—the dragon Leine and the teenager Mally Gunn. You see, I took two years of Latin in high school. I fared poor to middlin’ since I didn’t study much, but I got by, and I’m still glad I endured the gray-haired Mrs. Montgomery’s class for two years. But I was not a Latin scholar for sure.

In spite of my academic laziness as a high school Latin student, here’s photos of my just rediscovered third place medal won for a project at the Texas High School Student Junior Classical League convention in Waco, Texas in1966. I earned my way to the convention, not through scholarship, but by virtue of a homemade broomstick Roman Legion standard topped with a plaster-of-paris-filled rubber glove hand and a square red guidon with a big gold V sewn on it.

Anyway, those Latin root words I learned in high school Latin class still keep popping up all the time and remain helpful to me as a reader and a writer. As does the Google Translate software on the internet, I confess. After all, fifty years after my last Latin class, how else could I have translated, “Quod suus 'non cibum! Quod Marmor est meus equus!"  In English--“That’s not meat, that’s Marble, my horse!” which are Mally’s first words in Latin to the flying horny-toad dragon. Regardless of her protest, it wasn’t a good morning for Mally’s pretty appaloosa mare.

Thanks for tuning in today.