Texts, Treks, and Bears Oh My!

            A couple of weeks ago, I presented, along with my group, and discussed snippets of work by P.T. Barnum and Edward Abbey. Recently, I’ve noticed that ever since I’ve been considering what they’ve written more often. Beginning with P.T. Barnum who made a good point about billboard advertising. This point is being made with ignoring his sexist language, as I was appalled with him bringing up, “any man with a beautiful wife or daughter would probably feel disagreeably, if he should find branded indelibly across her smooth-white forehead, or on her snowy shoulder in blue and red letters such a phrase as this: ‘Try the Jigamaree Bitters!” (82). I have always found billboards to be extremely distracting and, if I’m being frank, ugly as well. Growing up, I’ve taken multiple road trips due to moving and have glanced out the window to see the nice scenery just to find a billboard for a business having a call to ...

Along the paths of campus there are many trees whose limbs creep onto the trail, but this one in particular shows them all up. Its limbs stretch up and even rise above the three-story building it is planted next to. The trunk itself is not perfectly straight but has a slant to it as if the tree were stretching out its side. The tree itself has five main branches, and from there comes a web of smaller and smaller branches, until the very end result ends in a trail of leaves. When you study the branches and the three further, you may notice that there is an area where the bark is not smooth but rough and jagged, the result of a branch having been sawn off in the past, perhaps. The leaves are bright green and plentiful—there is no denying the fact that this tree has the ability to produce and maintain its foliage. Some of the branches have started to brown; with it being the beginning of the fall season, it’s no surprise that a tree of this nature would shed its leaves ...

            Across the landscape of campus lies a bed of flowers between Clark and Sadler Hall.   All year round, TCU rotates the flowers as they start to wilt or seasons change; this fall, clusters of pink and white flowers of miniscule size overtake the bed.   If you were to reach down and grasp a handful, dozens of tiny flowers would fall out of the palm of your hand as you ripped them out of the earth.   The number of flowers included in each cluster varies from cluster to cluster, as the lowest group includes two flowers while the most populated one includes twenty.   They rest upon one another, points of the stars often overlapping one another in carefree embraces.   Although giving off a peaceful appearance by lightly moving in the breeze, if the flowers were involved in a raging battle, one glance would declare the pink flowers the victor, as they effectively outnumber the amount o...