Day 1: Thursday, May 6, 2021
If I were one to believe in omens, I would not have come on this trip. For one thing, it was postponed twice for bad weather and once for really bad weather. But I decided to come anyway.
I had an appointment with my cardiologist this morning; planned to leave directly from there. I always schedule my doctors' appointments as early as possible in the day, on the assumption that, by the time they've seen 2 or 3 other patients, they're way behind, and I don't like to wait. (I used to have a personal rule that I didn't wait more than 30 minutes for anybody. Yes, I was then even more arrogant and self-centered than I am now. Long years of marriage has, to some extent, forced an adjustment.)
So: my appointment was for 8:45. This particular doctor starts his day at nine. That gives the nurse time to check me in and go through the rituals of vital signs. (All were good, it seems.) So I have a few minutes to wait for the doctor to show up.
Twenty minutes go by. I'm reading The Coyotes of Carthage, by Steven Wright, and it's entertaining enough to get me through. At thirty minutes, I'm staring out the window at the downtown skyline, noticing what you can and cannot see from there (new Thompson Hotel, no; Milam Building, yes). As forty-five minutes tick by, I'm playing with the model of the human heart and pressing the "sleep" button on the electronic sign on the wall, as I'm damned tired of being told how to avoid getting the flu or Covid or anything else passed from person to person by air. As a hour passes, I open the exam room door to ask someone if maybe the doctor has been called to an emergency -- it's no problem for me to come back another day. Not like I have a lot to do. At an hour and twenty minutes, we have a sign that the doctor is in the house. His office door is open, but he's not in there.
Now, this trip is planned in only the loosest sense. It's just an excuse to get out on the open road, in a place with trees, and just go. I mean, the highlights I've been able to stitch into a "plan" for Day One consist of a statue made of junk; a defunct city hall; a small dam; and an old adobe house. The only place of genuine interest to me -- as opposed to some place included merely to give specious purpose to the route -- is a dinosaur park east of Austin.
Well, so the doctor comes and says his bit, cursing me with ten years added to my sentence upon this mortal coil. Mainly we talk about what I do with myself in retirement, because he's thinking of retiring (still; he's asked me these same questions three years in a row now; he says he plans to retire in maybe ten years, so I'm thinking I should come up with some more interesting answers than "play on the computer" and "watch soccer" and "build stained glass windows.") I recommend he keep working as long as he enjoys it, and we set an appointment for another next year.
By now it's after 10:30. Before leaving town, I want to empty the P.O. box -- sometimes it fills up with junk and there's no room for the good kind of mail -- and also I'm hungry. So I run by the post office, which is just down the street, toss the junk and stow the gold, and head down to the best of the four taquerÃas along McCullough south of the post office. There's no place to park, a surprise at nearly 11AM. So I get on the freeway, and decide on impulse to head into Southtown, where there are oodles and gobs of newish restaurants. Turns out there are also oodles and gobs of road closures and detours, and within about 15 minutes I've had enough. I find an unexpected freeway entrance and make use of it.
First stop: a giant stag that stands guard over an unremarkable subdivision in the city limits of Converse, Texas, a town of about 20,000 that nestles up against the county line east of San Antonio. It's built out of what look like mainly auto parts. I saw similarly styled
rescue sculptures in South Dakota, and it can be impressive. This statue would be impressive for its size, if nothing else -- it stands at least thirty feet high. But it's also, really, quite beautifully done. Plus, its impressive just for the fact that some land developer was willing to pay the cost of having such a thing erected. One really doesn't expect such people to have the aesthetic bent, does one?
From there, on to Seguin, seat of the next county over from San Antonio. The interstate was built several miles north of Seguin's downtown, so the urban sprawl lately visited on the city is well away from the interesting parts of town. But I'm not really interested in those interesting parts of town today. They require an extensive commitment of time and a desire to pass that time wandering up and down the sidewalks of an old country town, speaking to everyone. They are places of old friends and historic preservation cliques, and small local businesses such as today's city dwellers see only on television, and in black and white.
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The Doll House
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No, I'm there for two things: Los Nogales, the oldest building in town, and the Safford Dam on the Guadalupe River. In the case of the first, the navigation app on my phone took me to a dog-run log cabin on Live Oak Street. Okay, seen a lot of those ol' cabins around the country; well-preserved, but not what I'm looking for. Looked up the place on Wikipedia and finally got a physical location for it: just maybe 50 yards away, on the opposite side of the street, with the nondescript back of the building facing where I stood so it would look nothing like the photo on the web site where I'd found it. In fact, I
had seen it, and thought it was a tool shed. Walked over, was suitably impressed with the tininess of the house where somebody actually lived out a long life. Equally impressed by the Victorian-gingerbread "doll house" next to it, which someone had built --
built!-- for an orphan girl, one of many who were carted all over the country in the late 1800s and early 1900s looking for adoption-inclined families.
Then to the Dam. It's interesting because (a) it was designed by locally-famous architect Robert Hugman, and (b) it's curved in a sort of S-shape. It's actually built on a ledge of natural rock that stretches across the river, and is the site of the area's first power plant, still operated by the city of Seguin. But I found the view of the dam was much better from the bar on the opposite bank, than from the city park the navigation app took me to.
From there, a stop at a convenience store where I got a cup of too-sweet coffee and figured out how to listen to audiobooks from my phone on the car stereo. (I paired the devices back last year when I bought the car, but I guess they've forgotten each other during the pandemic. It's happened to so many, I know....) That made the drive both more enjoyable and more frustrating, since my navigation app kept interrupting the audiobook -- always at vital moments, of course -- to tell me to turn left in a quarter mile. I finally had to silence the navigator, which meant that I got simple electronic-tone alerts to let me know that I'd missed my turn. Well, the lesser evil...
I'm using Roadtrippers, a site I found many years ago on line. It's been through a number of changes over the years, but I've found it reliable enough that I finally bit the bullet and paid for the full membership. This is the first time I've actually used it for navigating, in conjunction with the usually-reliable Google Maps.
One drawback of Roadtrippers, though, is that it lists seemingly everything, usually without photographs or any information beyond a name and location. Sometimes the listing is sufficiently intriguing to get me to check it out; as happened today, when I went to see Neiderwald City Hall. (Neiderwald used to be a city, since subsumed in the urban sprawl of Kyle or Buda, I forget which.)
This is what I found:
I didn't bother to get out of the car for that.
Next came the Dinosaur Park. I got there just as it closed. Then a sculpture gallery that's out of business; then a small art gallery in downtown Bastrop, where I passed a satisfying half-hour, though I was disappointed by the calibre of glass on display. I'd expected more, and better, from the description of the place. But it was air-conditioned, so I sat inside to check email and consult my trip planning app.
Then the Dime Box Museum. Dime Box is a town famous for its name. The museum was, of course, already closed.
At that point it struck me that I was not enjoying my wander. The roads were too choked with traffic, the "sights" along the way too dull or mundane. So I turned off the navigator, dragged out the old-fashioned paper map of Texas, and set off down a random road heading vaguely south and east. That was when the trip became enjoyable, The sky was a gorgeous blue, the air was cool in the shade of the trees and warm in the sun. On the backroads I found no traffic, just curves, sweeping or sharp, and beautiful meadows and woods and creeks. I found myself in Brenham, famous for the Blue Bell Creamery (which I may go to in the morning, if it's open when I leave). Had dinner at a seafood-and-steak restaurant next to my hotel -- a place that got four and a half stars on TripAdvisor, so we know that that website is unreliable. It wouldn't get two chili peppers from me, if I were still doing restaurant reviews, and there would be mention of the smell of the fryer grease, which may or may not have been plant-based when it was new, possibly back before the pandemic.
Day 2: Friday, May 7
Blue Bell Creamery. In many people's minds, and not without justification, it is Brenham. Having once spent a very nice long weekend in the town without going to the Creamery, I can testify that there's more to Brenham than the one famous business. But Blue Bell, easily the largest local business, is also the only thing the town is famous for. That being so, to have been to Brenham, twice now, and not gone to the Creamery, would be too snobbish for words. So this morning, I went to the Creamery. Conveniently, it was on my way out of town, and also conveniently, it opened at 8AM, the precise time I was passing by.
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At the Blue Bell Creamery
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You may have heard, there's a pandemic going on? It's true, and I know this because Blue Bell Creamery isn't giving tours during the pandemic. Also the observation deck overlooking the processing floor has been converted into an employee break room, since nobody's been coming to the Creamery to see how the magic is worked. But the gift shop is open, with its extensive selection of coffee mugs, ice cream scoops, t-shirts and baby clothes; and more importantly, the ice cream shop is open, selling about two dozen flavours of one of the world's best ice creams -- certainly the best large-production ice creams -- for a buck a scoop. Hard to believe I only got one, at eight o'clock in the morning.
That was the start of a relaxed, I might even say laid back day. I looked at the planned route on RoadTrippers, and looked at the map, and decided, Naaaaahh, not gonna do that. So I studied the paper map, picked out a route to the northeast on the smallest roads shown, and headed off through the verdant East Texas morning. (I really need a new Texas highway map; wish I'd thought to bring the big map book that I left in the other car.) I went through such charming communities as William Penn and Independence (where I did not stop to see the home of Sam Houston's widow) and Clay, then into College Station, where I hiked a couple of easy trails in Lick Creek Park, a sort of tame wilderness area on the southern edge of town.
After that, I headed up the road to Bryan, to see the Brazos Valley African American Museum, one of the few East Texas attractions I was genuinely interested in. It's a small museum, with a small budget. One section of it is devoted to the individuals who did things important to the civil rights struggles since the end of the Civil War; that part was interesting, even though the information presented was mostly superficial. All the Big Names were there, but it also included short biographies of a great many people I'd never heard of, people whose contributions to the cause should be more widely known.
The rest of the museum was devoted to purely local history, and was presented in a vague way that was, frankly, unedifying to me as an outsider. There were a few items of furniture, the sort of things that everybody, black or white, would have had in their homes in the early 20th Century; displays of personal effects of local individuals, but with no explanation of why they were represented in the museum; and there were a couple of dozen transcripts of oral histories that contained only the blandest of descriptions of life in the Brazos Valley, mostly from the 1960s and 1970s. The impression I got is that, if there was a struggle going on, these people were way outside the war zone. Having read several of the transcripts, I now know that one woman's favourite holiday was Thanksgiving, because the whole family got together at the ancestral home in a nearby farm community, while another woman's favourite holiday was Easter; I don't recall why.
This month marks the 100th anniversary of the Greenville Riot in Tulsa, when the most prosperous African-American community in the country at the time was utterly and completely destroyed by rioting whites ginned up by the usual (and, as usual, false) accusation that some black boy made improper advances to some white girl. That massively cruel and destructive event should be the focus of intense national attention, especially in the current political environment. It perfectly illustrates the worst aspect of Black history since the Civil War: that every time Black folks prospered a little, they had it taken away, usually violently. But this museum of African American history had exactly one mention of the event, a single 4x6 photograph of the smouldering ruins.
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Nueces Bluff Overlook
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After that, I drove northeast through Madisonville (where I stumbled on a very good lunch at Walker's Cafe, on the courthouse square) and Crockett (where I forgot to visit the spring where Davy Crockett drank; oh, well...) to the Nueces Bluff Overlook. I always like vistas, so I was excited at the prospect of a prospect. I didn't have high expectations, of course: There are no truly high hills in East Texas. But I did anticipate a view of the Nueces River from a high vantage point, with rolling green hills stretching away into the distance. What I got was a view of trees from a relatively high vantage point, with rolling green hills stretching away to the next ridge, about 8 miles away. The river was directly below, but the forest was so thick that it couldn't be seen. Not even a hint of it. I'm guessing that, when they built the overlook's platform, you could see to the bottom where the river lies. Not any more.
So, the stops today were disappointing from first to last, but at least the drive was fun and the weather was, once again, perfect. And I got "nice car" comments at almost every stop, which is a balm to my vanity. That's important, for no good reason.
Day 3: Saturday, May 8
I thought Rusk and Palestine, the two towns thirty minutes apart that are joined by the steam-powered Texas State Railway, were about the same size. Turns out Rusk is much smaller, as I found out when I looked into hotels and restaurants. I only needed one hotel, and found that in Rusk, but the dining choices seemed to be limited to fast food, fried chicken and barbecue. So dinner was a couple of hard-boiled eggs and an apple from the supermarket. Breakfast was in Palestine.
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The Howard House, Palestine
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There were a number of historic buildings listed on RoadTrippers in Palestine, all grouped closely together, so I decided to take a look at them. A couple appeared to be open to the public, but none looked to me to be worth more attention than a quick drive-by. I took some pictures to post to RoadTrippers (because I get a little irked at how many entries there have
no information beyond a name and location) and moved on.
My next stop was the site of the Killough Massacre, where in 1838, 18 settlers were attacked by Indians and killed or kidnapped. It was, according to the marker erected over a century later, "the largest Indian atrocity in East Texas." In my present mood, I wonder at the hypocrisy of those who would defend the Indians but condemn modern Americans who react violently to the same sort of immigrant invasion; of those who would defend the settlers but damn the same sort of immigrant invasion; and those who would call for vengeance against the perpetrators of 18 atrocities in East Texas, but shrug at the perpetrators of hundreds and hundreds of atrocities in Tulsa. It's complicated, but there's enough wrong to go around.
From there I headed northeast, in the most roundabout way I could find, until I reached Carthage. There, alongside a freeway, is a sculpture illustrating the well-known story called Footprints In the Sand (where a man thinks the Lord abandoned him because he looks back and sees only one set of footprints). The display at Carthage consists of a trail of footprints, first two sets, then one, and farther on a statue of an oddly large and squat Jesus carrying an old man who looks at Him with an expression of babyish incomprehension. The entire tableau is surrounded by benches and walls that serve mainly as places to put the names of all who contributed to the construction (and there are a lot of them). Matthew 6:1 comes to mind.
From there, I went into town to see the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame and Tex Ritter Museum.
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a typical display
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The Hall of Fame follows the standard format for such institutions: display cases dedicated to each inductee, filled with personal items donated by them, a few photographs, and a brief hagiographic account of the honoured one's life. A large part of the space is given over to Ritter, who certainly earned his place in the Hall of Fame, and also had the good fortune to be a local boy. (There's also a small display devoted to Ritter's famous son, John, who is probably even better known than his father.) But there are many displays of many country music musicians, and a free juke box to hear their work on.
I ended up spending so much time going through this surprisingly interesting museum that, when I came out, it was really too late to continue the planned trip. If I drove on toward Texarkana, as I'd intended, I'd arrive there too late to see the only thing that interested me, a car museum. But since it was really the drive itself that appealed, I figured I could just as easily go the opposite direction, back towards home, and save myself the anticipated day-long drive on Interstate highways from Texarkana to San'tonio.
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The Davy Crockett Spring
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And so that's what I did. It also provided me with the opportunity to see the one thing in Crockett, Texas, that I was curious about, the Davy Crockett Spring (see Day 2, above). It turns out to be a plain ol' 1960s-vintage water fountain, nonfunctional, set in a pile of brown stone.
Really glad that was literally on the way.
And because I, apparently, touched a wrong control on Google Maps and spent a good long time trying to verify that I really was heading west, as the car's rearview mirror claimed, and not east, as the Google Maps display showed, I drove right through Bryan, where I'd figured on getting a room for the night, without even seeing it. And by the time I'd figured out what the deal was with the Maps display, I was close enough to home to just head on down the road.
Not all the pictures from this trip are included here. If you want to see them all, click here.
