A travel note from Sta

We’re done roaming for a month. A week ago Thursday, we headed up to San Antonio and visited Joseph, number one son, and his friend, Veronica, had a couple of pleasant meals at SA bistros, jammed a bit, visited with old friend Linda Reeves and husband Jim and had a pleasant three days in the Old Town, then lumbered on to Lubbock to visit Justin, number Two son.

Kathy requires a minimum of an hour and a half in a Half-Price Books store, looking over materials for teaching and general intellectual growth. Otherwise, she seems not to feel that she has really seen San Antonio. I’m no longer convinced that the answers I’m looking for anymore are in books, or at least in books already written, so, after I’d considered the idea of three CD’s with much music by the Duke, I was fairly well done.

We supped at Cha Cha’s on the first night, a quiet place that serves a mean margarita and an excellent enchilada verde, sitting in one of several plastic rose covered wrought iron gazebos that populate Cha Cha’s second dining room, and then retired to Joe’s apartment to converse and jam. Joe has evolved into an accomplished bassist and is studying the jazz literature of the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, and we had a fair time running through “Night in Tunisia” and other charts as well as some of the material I’d covered in forty years playing rock and roll and folk guitar.

The second night we arrived at a place called Doughs Pizzeria, an upscale joint where, we discovered, they take their wine a little more seriously than we ever have. A request for a ‘house sauvignon” produced some consternation and serious inquiries from the wine master as to what we liked about the requested sauvignon, its fruitiness, its tartness? We settled on a few glasses of a now-forgotten vintage and a boutique beer which Kathy reported was very beer-like. I reminisced on older days that included cases of Buckhorn beer from Minnesota at four dollars a case. Buckhorn, as I recollect it, had very beer-like qualities. Our opening drinks were accompanied by slices of cantelope wrapped in a thinly-sliced and odd Italian cold cut.

The pizza arrived, and we were confronted with flat bread sprinkled with a white cheese and a few caramelized onion slices and mushrooms. Since we’d skipped the antipasto and salad courses, we left a bit hungry but with a very healthy bill.

Saturday found us at Jim and Linda Reeves. Linda is an old high school buddy of Kathy’s, a former college English teacher turned librarian. Jim is retired from accountancy and money management and an excellent host, stuffing us with many variations of Mexican cuisine, fruit and fruit drinks, and large quantities of various ice creams. The treat of the visit, though, was Linda and her accordions. She has two piano accordions, a button accordion, and a very primitive Cajun machine with external mechanics. Her love is conjunto, though, that lively polka indigenous to South Texas of which San Antonio represents the northern fringe. She sang several Women’s Drinking Songs excoriating the infidelity and stupidity of the typical macho-intoxicated lover and asserting the woman’s natural strength and rights as well as her pain and taught Kathy and me several conjunto standards which we frolicked through repeatedly. She may very well venture down for the next conjunto festival at the Narciso Martinez Cultural Arts Center in San Benito. San Benito is the legendary home of the art, she says, for the northern South Texas conjunto afficionado, and is held in great esteem and reverence.

Then a day of traveling Texas. There is no direct route from San Antonio to Lubbock. We chose to drive toward El Paso on I-10 and cut north on US 83 (yes, the same road that follows the river up to Laredo and then turns north) up to Ballinger, catch the cut on Texas 158 to Bronte and then north on 277 for eight or nine miles to Texas 70, a genuine country road, meandering north through the windmill fields on the edge of the central Texas plateau to Sweetwater; thence thirty miles on I20 to US 84 to Lubbock. A long and winding road if there ever has been one. All in all, it’s six or seven hours of driving, the time being dependent on one’s will to persevere. As I am not all that perseverant these days, it can be eight hours for me. But I’m stopping along the way to gather up perceptions and photographs, so even when I’ve stopped, I’m busy. Or so I say.

Do fill your gas tank before you take one of these cross-Texas treks or you could end up buying your gas in someplace such as Junction, where we encountered our first-ever over-four-dollar gas price. We didn’t actually buy there. On the way up, we had filled up in San Antonio, but on the way back, encountering this sign at Junction, we nearly ran dry by the time we made it to a Kerrville exit and saved sixteen cents on the gallon, sweating every tenth of a mile towards the end, to the extent that I started kicking the Prius into neutral for some wild rides coasting two and three miles down the hills. The folks in Junction know why they can charge a consistent fifteen cents above the cities.

The ride between interstates is pleasant. The roads are small, but the highway folks have engineered the curves well and found enough natural switchbacks to make the grades reasonable. And there is Texas to pay attention to, in those parts a land of long vistas and surprisingly pleasant visual compositions. And some of the towns are interesting to consider. We slowed down for Menard, stopped in its park along the San Saba River, gave consideration to its wide main street, now mostly abandoned except the block that cleaves to Highway 83, wondering what commerce had made it thrive and how would locals respond to artists moving among them. One building in particular caught my eye, a long block building of late 1920’s vintage, with a garage door towards the back on a side street and a windows of glass blocks. Cheap studio space if you can get along with the natives, I thought, and then there was a blossoming of ideas of a creative community out in the hills, a new outlaw movement, music, theater, visual arts creating truth in the rough. I’d thought it before. There’s a happily named Rosebud on US 77 on the way to Waco where we stopped for sodas at a restaurant and bakery with a for sale sign in the window. Off I went, rebuilding and re-populating the town around a bakery/restaurant/coffeehouse venue with enough floor space for seventy-five, if you pressed it, in the central Texas within a couple of hours of Austin. Room enough for a party.

The last stop we made on the road to Lubbock was at a rest stop on US 84 a few minutes south of Post, Texas, a prosperous but peculiar little town founded by C.W. Post as part of his personal journey to Wellsville and the founding of Postum (then Post) Cereals in Battlecreek, Michigan. The stop’s central feature was a frog pond of a couple acres size surrounded, as is any body of water in those parts, by cottonwoods and willows. The pond is a lovely soup of rotting leaves and algae and submersible weeds and makes a fine place for a frog to raise a family or two, and some of the residents have grown to excellent size. The fellow pictured here is as big as two fists clasped together. We spotted three or four of similar size in fifteen minutes of looking around. But every square foot of water along the shore had a frog chin or two poking through, small though they might be, and heard splashes from other of their fellows diving off the mud to flee our approach.

Lubbock sprawls. Cheap land, easy to grade into lots and build have encouraged outward growth. Its streets are gridded north and south, east and west and, because there is only one stream of consequence on the far east side of town, they are as straight and logical in their arrangement as the streets of river city Brownsville are twisted and curled and given to solipsistic inner thoughts. And every mile one encounters a section road of at least four lanes. Only the state highways, connecting Lubbock to the outside world, run at angles other than ninety degrees. Furthermore, East-West streets are numbered, making it a mere act of counting to find, say, 43rd Street, where son Justin and friend Ingrid have just bought a house. Fortunately, they took a partial break from their re-decoration and maintenance schedules to celebrate out visit.

Lubbock has surprises. Raymond Brigham, Kathy’s uncle by marriage, accompanied us on a visit to the American Wind Power Center on the city’s eastern skirt. This is an amazing place. Its lawn, covering several acres, is filled with working windmills of varying design and vintage, including a VESTAS Model V47 three-bladed wind generator on a fifty-foot tower. This is one of the devices that are beginning to crowd the ridges along the edges of Texas’s central plateaus and, perhaps, indicating some hope for a future less dependent on petroleum and petroleum products for our energy wants.

Inside, the museum’s main hall can educate the visitor on the importance of wind power in the opening and development of the west. Most of Texas west of the Piney Woods and central river valleys is dry— very, very dry—and would not have been put to much use without wind-driven pumps to provide water.

It’s a new facility and is still being developed. A second wind generator, a GE Model 1.5s, sits in pieces on the ground outside the museum. A handout pamphlet shows a plan to develop a building around it, but the AWPC folks are still looking for funding. Inside the existing building, Legina Fairbetter, an art teacher at the Texas Tech University College of Architecture is working on a massive mural that runs three-fourths the length of the building on an interior wall at least forty feet high.

Lubbock is 685 miles from Brownsville, a good day’s drive, no matter how you cut it, and no one would be blamed for breaking it into a couple of days.  Mapquest says the drive time should be somewhere around ten hours, but their route is a little less direct than ours. Nevertheless, we took fourteen hours to make it, with many stops at road cuts to take in the sights and collect an occasional rock for our Bhudda garden and a longer stop at a San Antonio Starbucks briefly meeting Joseph. It is not a downhill ride, but up and down in a rollicking descent from Lubbock’s 1200 foot elevation that’s bad for gas mileage. Where, on a trip from Austin a couple of weeks ago, our Prius had averaged 48.3 miles to the gallon, from Lubbock, it made barely 39 miles to the gallon. This is, of course, much better than the 20-24 mpg from our aging Dodge van, but it is a note of some disappointment.

-stan