Day 109: Out Of Abilene

Abilene to Merkel. 20.5 miles/2049 total

Friday, April 9, 2010

Starting out from South 3rd and Elm in Abilene, just down the street from the modern Taylor County Courthouse, I'm heading up to take a little walk around the downtown, then west out Highway 84 to a spot about a mile and a half past Merkel.

It’s another sunny day, with a few high cirrus clouds. Temperature is around 60 now, going to 75, with a strong breeze out of the south.

Between South 1st and North 1st run the tracks of the Texas and Pacific Railroad, and the area for about a hundred feet on either side of the tracks is a sort of park, going along for several miles, in which some sculptures are displayed. This greensward is planted with pine trees and other ornamentals.

I turn north onto Cypress, first passing the Grace Hotel/Museum, which I described yesterday, then walking north to the other notable hotel in town, the Wooten. It’s 17 stories, built in 1930 in a relatively unadorned Art Deco style. When it was built it was the tallest building in Texas between Ft. Worth and Waco. Like the Grace, it is no longer a hotel. It’s an office building, and I’ll venture to say it’s nowhere close to being fully occupied. I take a turn around the classy lobby, which has been maintained pretty much as it must have looked back when it was new. Within the Wooten building is the Paramount Theater, maintained or restored to its original charm, now used for film festivals and similar events.

Like Beaumont, a city of comparable size, Abilene has maintained its downtown business district very well, even though not all the buildings are occupied. Up at N. 6th Street is the large modern Abilene Civic Center, and Abilene seems to have an active arts and classical music scene.

I head west to Orange Street, where some of the big churches are located. These are massive, block-square houses of worship—St. Paul United Methodist, First Central Presbyterian, First Christian (Disciples of Christ), and the jewel of them all, the First Baptist Church, done in blond brick in what I think might be a sort of restrained Moorish revival style, its tower looking as much like a minaret as anything else. I expect to hear the call to prayer coming out of it, but instead, on the hour, there’s a recording of a carillon playing “Abide With Me.”

You’d think these Protestant churches would merge, like banks and oil companies, since they’re all selling the same thing, and without a hell of a lot of difference. But of course they think they’re substantially different from one another, and remain handicapped by this conviction.

Across from First Baptist Church is the North Funeral Home, which, according to a sign out front, was once the Laughter Undertaking Company. You can sort of see why a name change was in order, although the latter name was, I'm sure, pronounced “Lauter.”

I’m now heading west out of downtown on N. 1st Street. Out into the Big Country, as they call this particular part of Texas—Abilene and the surrounding counties.

I must say the State of Texas has some of the most handsome and well-designed highway infrastructure—bridges, overpasses, underpasses, and the like--I've seen anywhere. Nicely done with decorative flourishes here and there, including the use of facings that look like blocks of rough-hewn stone. Just some extra little touches that most places don’t bother with.

West of Abilene the land seems more flat than anything else. I know I must be going uphill, but it’s a slow ascent. I enter a bit of the small city of Tye. Here U.S. 84 merges with Interstate 20, so I go down to the access road and start walking there.

It’s beginning to dawn on me that these ubiquitous ugly rough-barked bush-trees I’ve been seeing for several days are mesquite trees. I looked up mesquite on the internet last week, but the illustrations didn’t seem to resemble what I was seeing very closely. However, now I can see a few leaves, and they are definitely mesquites.

I enter the limits of the City of Merkel, population 2,637. I’ll be bypassing the center of town. Merkel was originally called Windmill Town when the railroad came through, but was renamed for a local German guy a few years later.

I pass the Abundant Life Assembly of God. I once knew a guy who theorized that each Assembly of God church was responsible for assembling a different part of God—the left big toenail, the right nostril, one of the teeth, and so on. They operated kind of like automobile sub-assembly plants, and then every ten years or so they’d have a national convention where they’d bring all the parts together and assemble a whole God. Then they’d start the process all over again. I must say that this is every bit as sensible and reasonable—and at least as believable—an explanation of their purpose and activities as anybody in an Assembly of God church would be likely to give.

I stop in to the Merkel Area Historical Museum, located right here on I-20. At first when I go in all I see are several tables of very old people playing dominoes, and what looks like the contents of a flea market or antique store, but with nothing for sale. Evidently the museum doubles as a social center for the over-90 crowd. But the “curator,” a woman named Judy, sees me and begins to show me around. It’s a large museum, all of which I won't get a chance to see because it's nearing closing time. But I see some old military uniforms and memorabilia of Merkelites, lots of arrowheads, old appliances, guns, and the like.

Judy does confirm that I’ve been seeing mesquite trees, and tells me quite a bit about them—how hard they are to kill because of their long taproots, how you can eat the beans and use the wood, and how as a girl she would climb them and get some kind of honey-like substance from them. She also said the fact that the larger mesquites haven’t begun to leaf out yet means there’s going to be at least one more cold spell around here, because mesquites are good predictors of the weather in that respect.

As a souvenir of Merkel I took away two light green glass balls, somewhat nicked and chipped, about an inch in diameter. Several cars full of these balls were being transported by train in the 1940s, to be melted down and used for various glass items, when there was a train wreck in Merkel, causing the balls to spill out along the tracks. Even though the railroad scooped up as many as it could, many more remained, sinking into the ground. As a girl Judy and her friends would go down to the tracks and find them and use them for marbles or in slingshots. As I walk down the road now I’m clicking these balls together, reminding myself of Humphrey Bogart as Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

As I approach my destination, off in the distance south of the highway I can see a stretch of mesas several miles long, with a hundred or more modern giant windmills running across the ridge. From a distance they look eerily like crosses, especially when they appear to be clumped in threes.

There’s a dead coyote by the side of I-20, grimacing with curved canines. I see what I think are wisps of cotton in the weeds, like back along the Mississippi, but I soon realize they are bits of the coyote’s pale brown fur, sheared off by the wind and by death.

Day 108: Into Abilene

Lawn to Abilene. 21.6 miles/2028.5 total

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Here at Highway 84 and County Road 162 there's dust in the air from newly-plowed fields. I head north in the direction of Abilene, where I'll almost reach the center of the city.

Today’s the kind of day every walking day should be. There isn’t a cloud in the deep blue sky. It’s in the low 50s, expected to get only into the high 60s. A light breeze is blowing from the west.

I’m going past a huge spread called Kington Farms. It goes on for a mile or more. Many acres under cultivation, growing winter wheat, and a ranch where they have Angus cattle. And God knows what else.

Yesterday I visited the Grace Museum in downtown Abilene. It used to be a luxury hotel, the Hotel Grace, built in the early 1900s. It fell into disuse and was gutted and extensively vandalized, but not long ago someone decided to restore it and turn it into a museum. So they fixed up the lobby with the original colors and mission-style furnishings. They found one intact ornate capital at the top of an interior column, and from that they made a mold and recreated dozens of capitals from plaster.

On the first floor is an temporary exhibit of John James Audubon prints and paintings—probably about a hundred items. The second floor is devoted to a children’s museum. And on the third floor is the Abilene Historical Museum, with lots of old local memorabilia and historical information.

One interesting item from the city's past is the Abilene Epileptic Colony, a state institution begun at the turn of the last century. Seems hopelessly old fashioned now, but back then it was right on the cutting edge. Get those epileptics all in one place and see what the hell happens, I guess. Back then the thinking was that lots of fresh air and hard work was the best thing for epilepsy. Good hard work provided more or less for free, that is. Then in the 1920s they began experimenting at the Epileptic Colony and other places with a new drug called Dilantin, and that began to transform the treatment of epilepsy. After the 20s the colony started taking in retarded people in addition to epileptics and changed its name to the Abilene State Hospital, then later to the Abilene State School. I think it still exists, although it must be overdue for another name change. The unofficial motto of mental health planners is, "When in doubt, change the name."

Right before Highway 84 merges with Highway 83, I see a sign that suggests I am in, or near, a place called Tuscola. It lies a few miles from here. “Tuscola” is a faux Indian word invented by Henry Schoolcraft when he was naming some of the counties of Michigan. I couldn’t find any versions of how this Tuscola came to be named, but I’d bet that some folks from up north had a hand in it.

I begin to pass small subdivisions of very new houses, advertising country living with city amenities, with names like Mountain Shadows Ranch. The multi-gabled hip roofs of the McMansions are thick in the distance. Small, newish shade trees grow in the yards.

As I enter the city limits of Abilene I step off the highway and start walking along the access road. A few miles later, as things become more urban, I turn north onto Buffalo Gap road, to head up into the center of the city. Buffalo Gap lies about 12 miles south of here, and once was the seat of Taylor County. But when the railroad bypassed Buffalo Gap in favor of Abilene in the 1880s, they lost the seat.

After I turn up Buffalo Gap Road it’s all city. Not big city—small city. Wide boulevards and stores piled on top of stores, haphazardly, with no thought of arrangement. Big Lots, Alfredo’s Mexican, Power Shack Gym, doctor’s offices, a drive-through Taco Bell, then maybe a few houses filled with people who probably wish they lived somewhere else that isn’t so noisy. Then a 1960s church, all cinder blocks and steep pitched roof, then more houses and more stores and repeat, like an endless tape loop. Throw in a school every now and then, and some dinky afterthought business, like Lucille’s Flowers and Gifts, in a little house with a broken sign out front. One of those small businesses the statistics say will probably fail within the first five years, and good riddance I say. Because the average person doesn’t know jack shit about running a business. So they cheat on taxes, underpay their employees, stiff their suppliers, and then wonder what’s happened to this country when a person can’t start a business and get rich. They whine, and then go out of business. They're my least favorite kinds of capitalists, because they can’t be unionized, give no benefits, are exempt from practically all workplace laws, can’t be regulated, and they offer nothing you can’t get somewhere else cheaper and better and colder and fresher.

A bunch of school girls—they look like maybe freshmen—are running up the sidewalk toward me. I give them the sidewalk. Girls’ cross country team, or something, getting some spring training. Their t-shirts say “Cougars.”

Numbered streets start. This is 35th, counting down. I’m headed for 3rd. Every half mile or so at a busy intersection the neon signs and junk start and then taper off to houses again.

At about 18th Street I begin to go by the campus of McMurray University, a Methodist institution. Most of the buildings are built of blond brick and date from about the middle of the last century, including the handsome neo-Gothic chapel-auditorium. Above the doors is a cross, and above that appear four words of inspiration and admonition: “TEMPERANCE KNOWLEDGE REVERENCE PATRIOTISM.” The last one seems out of place. Temperance I know has always been a hobbyhorse of the Methodists. It was they more than any other group who took this country into Prohibition. Knowledge, well, that's sort of what you'd expect a university to be shooting for. Reverence, yeah yeah. It is a church-related school, after all. But patriotism? Isn't that the last refuge of scoundrels? How do they square that with the others?

At 14th street I turn right and take a detour over to Butternut Street before continuing my northward jaunt toward the center of the city. Butternut is old urban. These stores used to be something else before becoming what they are now—mattress stores, antique stores, dollar stores, gun stores, payday loan stores. And, to a pretty great extent, empty stores. I think this is my favorite part of a city, this pre-downtown desolation of one-story mostly defunct businesses. Slanting forward in 1950s modernity, trimmed with aluminum. One can’t help but wonder what’s next for a street like this. There’s no rebuilding here. These places have used up their nine lives. I see a future of vacant lots. People have cars, and they'll go out to the malls and to Walmart. They'll never spend money here, except in these little last ditch specialty shops.

The handful of tall downtown buildings is now visible a few blocks to the north. That'll be for tomorrow. Right now I'm headed for 3rd and Elm and the end of the walk.

Full Circle

Abilene, Texas

April 7, 2010

My kind of weather today in Abilene. Overnight it got down into the 40s, perfect for sleeping, and during the day it barely reached 70 under a bright blue sky. Everywhere I went people were complaining about the "cold spell."

Abilene was named for Abilene, Kansas. The connection was that they were both cattle towns. Abilene, Kansas was the last stop on the Chisholm Trail and home to a stockyard. It was also famous as the place where Wild Bill Hickok had briefly been marshall, and where several notorious outlaws, like John Wesley Hardin, had lived. The Texas Abilene was started in the 1880s as a cattle shipping point on the Texas and Pacific Railroad. If its ambition was to be as big as its Kansas namesake, it succeeded brilliantly after a slow beginning. Today this Abilene has a population of over 120,000, while the one in Kansas has about 6,500 folks. It has three universities--Abilene Christian, Hardin-Simmons, and McMurray. It's also home to Dyess Air Force Base. (The Walmart where I'm staying is crawling with uniformed service personnel.)

And oh my God. Abilene is the hometown of Jessica Simpson. She's the one I was picturing in my mind as I entered that town in northern Louisiana where Britney Spears was from. So now I've come full circle, sort of. Jessica Simpson is the one whose skin had to be tamed--to be disciplined by Proactiv, the acne cream. I hope to God her skin has learned its lesson by now.

I did have a rather odd experience at a place called Books A Million, which is what passes down here for a large chain bookstore, although if you took out the sections on Christian literature, inspirational books, Christian fiction, and various editions of the Bible, you'd be left with a bunch of copies of the Twilight series and a few hundred Harlequin romances and not a hell of a lot else. I went in for a World Almanac, and when I went to the front desk to ask the cashier (a big and energetic young man) where they were, rather than just telling me he left the register and walked me all the way to the back of the store to the shelf where they sat. I grabbed one and walked back up to the front to buy it. But he hadn't returned yet, so I stood in front of the register to wait. After a few minutes he walked up, and I said, "Looks like I beat you up here." He looked at me with a puzzled expression, and rather than go behind the checkout counter he came and stood in front of me for a few seconds. Then suddenly a light seemed to go on in his head. He said, almost under his breath, "Oh, for a second I thought you said something about beating me up," and went back to the cash register to ring up my order. I was tempted to suggest to him that with his particular skill set he might be more suited to being a bouncer in a bar than a bookstore employee. It does illustrate how delightfully ambiguous our language can be sometimes.

Day 107: Obey All Rules

Silver Valley to Lawn. 20 miles/2006.9 total

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

From Silver Valley I head up U.S. 84 toward Goldsboro and Lawn, to a spot about two miles past Lawn.

It’s a bit overcast this morning, but the clouds are already beginning to disperse. When the sun comes out it’ll be hot—into the high 80s or more. But right now the wind is blowing so strongly from the southwest that it’s keeping things fairly comfortable.

The cedars and junipers that dotted the pastures on the way up from Austin have been replaced up here by some kind of small unattractive deciduous bush/trees that still haven’t leafed out in this early spring. They grow from the rock walls, in the fields, at the edges of the road, everywhere. They're the most prevalent tree around here, and I can't identify them yet--scrubby little things, with deeply furrowed bark. As soon as the leaves start to come out I’ll be able to tell what they are with the aid of my tree book.

The first place I go through is Silver Valley. There’s nothing left of it along Highway 84. I checked the internet for something on the history, and found a quite detailed article about it, but it comes down to this: it was here at one time, and now it’s not. Cotton farming, a gin, a few mercantile establishments, then a decline starting around World War One. That’s almost a century of decline. Now there are just the signs, at either end, about a quarter of a mile apart, and a side road going over the railroad tracks.

Today is a milestone of sorts. I will reach the 2000 mile mark this afternoon. It was around Jackson, Mississippi that I hit 1000 miles. It took me 58 days of walking to get to that point, and only 49 days to get here, although the total elapsed time for the first thousand was less. I imagine I’ll be somewhere over on the other side of Phoenix when I reach 3000. Who knows when that’ll be.

One of the things I liked about Eric Joffrion, the guy I met yesterday at the Coleman antiques mall, was that when I explained how I’m doing the walk he got it right away. No yawning, head scratching, or lapses of attention. In fact, after I gave him the thumbnail sketch of the logistics, he interrupted me and said, “so you just keep leapfrogging along, then, eh?” Which was exactly how I would have put it.

When he told me his name, and not knowing yet how it was spelled, I asked him if he was any relation to Montreal hockey great Boom Boom Geoffrion. He said “distantly,” by which I discovered he meant that all the Joffrions were probably related, and indeed descended from one or two original French settlers. Some anglicized the spelling to “Geoffrion,” but they were all Joffrions once. Sure enough, when I looked up Boom Boom on the internet, it said that he was a direct descendant of Pierre Joffrion, an early settler. Eric’s family emigrated to Louisiana in the 1700s, probably during the diaspora caused by the sincere wish of the English to be rid of the French in Canada.

As I’ve mentioned before, nowadays both Acadians and Cajuns liken their expulsion from Canada to “ethnic cleansing,” and I suppose it was, in a somewhat less gruesome way. But look at it from the point of view of the English: they’d been at war with France for the better part of a millennium, with no end in sight. Now they were competing with France for preeminence in the New World and had, for who knew how long, gained the upper hand in Canada. What possible advantage could there be in letting a bunch of Frenchmen hang around, plotting and engaging in their Jesuitical machinations? We can hardly appreciate how much of a nuisance to one another the English and the French were during the hundreds of years before their 20th century alliances.

While still rolling, the countryside has relatively speaking flattened out, and much of it is given over to cultivation. I see some winter wheat, but I don’t know what else they grow around here, and whether they still plant cotton.

I arrive at Goldsboro. Nothing to report here, either. According to Wikipedia, it had an estimated population of 30 in 2000. I imagine the estimate was necessary because it was impossible to know if some of those who answered the doors of their trailers were actually human or only nearly so. The only building on Highway 84 is an old, one-room stone house, which most recently was a craft shop. Now it’s boarded up.

Here’s something interesting. I see a sign as I enter a highway construction area (and I’ve seen others like this in Texas and maybe other states) that reads, “Obey Warning Signs. State Law.” Now wouldn’t you think that it would go without saying that if you disobey any highway sign you’ve broken the law? Could it be that in Texas there's such a thing as a highway suggested warning sign? "Reduce Speed, If You Feel Like It." I can’t remember if I mentioned this before, but the whole thing puts me in mind of an episode of the Andy Griffith Show I saw once, where Barney Fife has two or three people in jail (one of whom was Otis Campbell, the town drunk.) Barney’s pacing up and down in front of the cells, strutting in his Barney way. He says, “Now men, there are two basic rules here at The Rock. Rule number one: ‘Obey All Rules.’ . . .”

You know those crosses on the side of the road, where people have died in traffic accidents? Here’s a pair that are a sad as any I’ve seen. One says “Charley Sr., 1-1-65 to 6-3-07" and the other says “Charley, Jr., 1-9-81 to 6-3-07.” A father and his sixteen-year-old son, killed together.

I leave Coleman County and enter Taylor County. The pavement is a different color. This county was named for three brothers, Edward Taylor, George Taylor, and James Taylor, all of whom died at the Battle of the Alamo. Abilene is the county seat, although the first seat was Buffalo Gap, which, let’s face it, sounds a lot cooler.

Finally I enter the city of Lawn, population 353. There used to be a Shell station here. I can tell from the yellow and red canopy over the pumps. But it’s closed now. The only thing open is the Highway Grocery Store, where I go to cool off and get a cold drink. Most of the rest of Lawn along Highway 84 consists of buildings that are either falling down or have already collapsed, and most have loose pieces of sheet metal that flap in the wind. But over to the west of the highway, across the tracks, there appears to be something of a village, with a school and a playing field.

Lawn was the birthplace of a character actor named Sunshine Parker (Lloyd Olen Parker), who lived from 1927 to 1999. The article in Wikipedia says he was known for playing bums and old codgers. He was in Road House and Tremors, which might have been the high point in his career. He was in a number of other movies and television shows. And that's the news from Lawn.

Day 106: Nothing To Report

Santa Anna to Silver Valley. 21.1 miles/1986.9 total

Monday, April 5, 2010

Today I walk out of the center of Santa Anna on Highway 84, heading through Coleman to a spot about 12 miles west of Coleman, just before the community of Silver Valley.

It’s completely overcast again, and looks like rain, but none is forecast. Yesterday was about the same, and by the end of the afternoon it was sunny. Maybe this is what passes for rain around here—some cloud cover and humidity in the air. We’ll see.

As I look around the hillsides on my way up and out of the little valley on the west side of Santa Anna, where if I turn around I can see one of the twin mesas looming in the distance, I notice the increasing profusion of prickly pear cactuses. I looked them up on the internet, and discovered that the little red knobs that grow on top of the flat round pieces are the fruits of the plant, and when handled carefully and removed from the plant, can be eaten raw. The knobs are on some cactuses already, but I cut a couple off and discover that they’re not very ripe yet. In doing so I get dozens of very tiny hairlike thorns in my fingertips, that take me some minutes to remove. If and when I repeat this experiment, I will wear leather gloves.

The roadside offers nothing particularly interesting today. At 8 miles I enter Coleman, population 5,127. Coleman is the seat of Coleman County, and the whole business was named for Robert Coleman, a signer of the Texas declaration of independence and a soldier at the Battle of San Jacinto. Now we all know what fighting at the Battle of San Jacinto entailed—barely enough time to shoot and reload a couple of times if you were lucky. Eighteen minutes—somewhat less time than it takes to watch an episode of Leave It To Beaver without the commercials. Even at that, quite a few people were killed and wounded, mostly on the Mexican side.

It’s pretty obvious that the Texas war for independence is the defining moment in history, as far as Texans are concerned, probably more revered than the American Revolution. Even the Battle of the Alamo, which was a complete defeat for the Texans, nevertheless gave rise to the rallying cry, “Remember the Alamo,” and spurred them on to more fighting, and the gaining of their independence four years later. One must view the term "independence" a bit askance, of course. Independence for the Texans meant the end of any hope for independence for Africans in the area. That is, assuming that the Texans had been obeying the Mexican emancipation decree of 1829, which seems unlikely. You might say the Texas war for independence was also the first war the Texans fought for the preservation of slavery. The second one came in 1861.

On the way into Coleman I come to a small park, planted in the southwestern style with cactuses and other desert plants, together with large flat slabs of rock arranged artistically. On one of the rocks there’s a bronze plaque that reads, “In memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose nonviolent efforts in the fight for civil rights has had a positive impact on the lives of all citizens of the City of Coleman, Texas." That strikes me as an unusually generous sentiment, considering that the percentage of African American residents here is less than three percent. Not to be cynical, but I don't suppose there are too many communities with such a small black population that would go out of their way to honor King, not just with a park, but by naming part of a highway after him.

I look down as I cross a small bridge to see my first live snake so far this spring. It’s about three feet long, lying there stretched out. At first I’m not sure it’s alive, but when I pass it scrambles and coils. It’s not a rattler, or a poisonous snake, but I give it plenty of leeway just the same.

A billboard says, “Welcome to Coleman, Texas. Life at a different pace.” I head west into the center of the city, past some pretty torn and frayed neighborhoods. They're pacing themselves, I guess. Then I go north up Commercial Avenue, which is extremely wide. It has two or three lanes on each side as well as a generous allowance for diagonal head-in parking, and the street ends about three blocks up, at the courthouse. The layout of this place reminds me of one of the cities I went through in western Louisiana—Jennings, I think.

I spend a pleasant three-quarters of an hour in an antiques mall on Commercial Ave., chatting with the proprietor, Eric Joffrion, who is originally from Louisiana Cajun country. I buy three knives, too. Now it’s time to get out of town and get back into this walk.

The walk from Coleman to where the motor home is parked is even less eventful than that of this morning. Nothing to report.

Some time after I get out of Coleman I look up to notice that the clouds have dispersed, just as they did yesterday, and it’s mostly sunny now. The only thing keeping the temperature from being uncomfortably hot is a strong breeze at my back, from the southeast, evidently coming up from the Gulf of Mexico.

Day 105: He's Up, And He's Good!

Brownwood to Santa Anna. 20.9 miles/1965.8 total

Sunday, April 4, 2010

I’m setting out from the parking lot of Walmart in Brownwood on Highway 84/67, going west through Bangs to Santa Anna.

It’s completely overcast and it looks like rain. That’s not predicted, and I sincerely hope it doesn’t happen. Temperature’s in the high 60s and expected to get into the high 80s.

As I make my way out to the west end of Brownwood the highway remains devoted to commercial activity, but of a more tacky kind. Dumpy little second hand stores, auto repair shops, local restaurants. I stop at an Exxon station to get a coffee.

I walk into a little fleabag flea market, just to see if they have any knives worth looking at. They don’t. On the way out I catch sight of a video cassette with a picture of Mick and Keith on the front from about the early ‘70s. The title of it is “Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones.” It so happens I have a VCR as well as a DVD player in the motor home. So I go back to look at it, and on the back I notice this sentence: “This video contains no music performed by Mick Jagger or the Rolling Stones.” Wonder what it does contain? I'll never know.

Someone once mentioned that I don’t talk about food much in the blog, and that’s true. My diet on the road is somewhat guarded, except on the rare occasions when I’m with people I know and we're dining at restaurants. I eat in restaurants sometimes on my off days, but in general I hate eating alone in restaurants. Also, I have a knack for finding bad places to eat. If there’s a choice, I’ll make what turns out to be the wrong one. By the way, don't bother to go into a Chinese restaurant in Texas. I've always had a theory that the farther away you get from either San Francisco or New York, the worse the Chinese food is likely to be. And Texas is about eqidistant from both cities.

In truth I have a bit of a fear of getting dysentery and being laid up or at least greatly compromised while by myself in the motor home. It hasn’t happened yet and I credit that to the fact that I eat a pretty nondescript and reliable diet of mostly processed food. It’s not that I don’t love to eat many different kinds of things, but I must say that doesn’t preoccupy me as it does some people.

So my regular, fairly rigid, diet remains oatmeal, coffee and a banana for breakfast, a ham and cheese sandwich on a tortilla and an apple for lunch, Nature Valley oats and honey bars and one or two bags of peanuts for snacks during the day, and more coffee. At night I usually eat a Banquet TV dinner (I can hear gasps from the food snobs). My two favorites are Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes and corn and grilled meat patty with noodles and gravy. The meat patty purports to be a combination of beef and pork, and who could ask for a better combination? Then in the evening I might have some popcorn or saltines with peanut butter and jelly. So it’s a quite a bit of protein and not much fiber. Fiber is overrated, in my opinion. Or, as one of my sons-in-law says, “That ain’t food—that’s what food eats.” I tend to agree.

One of the great things about us humans is that we can adapt to almost any diet available and thrive on it. So there's really no ideal human diet, in spite of what some people say. Living in the arctic? Eat whale blubber and seal meat. Living where there's no meat? Eat veggies and grains. Lots of milk-giving animals around? Eat cheese. Live by the ocean? Eat seafood. Not enough iron in your diet? Eat dirt. Of course there’s always someone to tell you that what you’re eating is all wrong, or that you should have such and such a combination of things, but those people are never satisfied with anything, in my experience. And more to the point, they’re generally wrong, or they’re only right until the next set of trendy expert opinions comes along. Here are two things I know about food. First, if you enjoy eating what you eat (and I do) you’re going to be better off than if you don’t. Second, there’s no surer way to get rich than to sell people a new diet, which most of the time is just an old diet dressed up differently.

Out at the edge of town, past the Brown County Sheriff’s Department, the highway begins to go uphill at a pretty steep rate. At the top of this hill I can look back and see all of Brownwood, a view I didn’t have on the way in from the east.

In a couple of hours I enter Bangs, population 1,620. Bangs sits on a flat expanse of a mile or two along Highway 84/67. It was named after Samuel Bangs, who was given the land for his services as a printer during the Texas war for independence. The town got rolling when the railroad came through in the 1880s. Today Bangs has junior and senior high schools and the mural on the side of the field house building says it’s the home of the Dragons. Go Dragons.

Bangs has several gas stations with convenience stores—Allsup’s, a Shamrock, and an Exxon. I opt for the Exxon again and get some coffee and fill up the water bottle. I also get a bar of chocolate, which I usually don’t do. But this is Easter, and nothing begs for chocolate more than the resurrection of the Lord. There might be a connection, since the scientific name of chocolate is theobroma, which means “food of the gods.” The Aztecs drank chocolate from golden cups, it was considered so special. So I guess it’s somehow appropriate that we should celebrate our civilization's chief god with some of the stuff. So this chocolate’s for you, Jesus.

In churches everywhere today people are singing songs of the resurrection. And here in Texas, where religion and football and country music all sort of merge, it seems appropriate to remember, on this holy day, the words of that great old hymn of the church, written and sung by Bobby Bare:

Drop kick me, Jesus through the goal posts of life,
End over end, neither left nor to right
Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights
Drop kick me, Jesus through the goal posts of life.

Outside of Bangs to the west I can see, for the first time, the twin mesas, known as “Santa Anna’s peaks.” Just a couple of low, flat hills, but they stick up above everything else, and Santa Anna is built between them, some nine miles away. The clouds are beginning to disperse, and it's getting hot.

In a few hours I arrive at the little upland city of Santa Anna, population 1,081, built alongside the two mesas. Santa Anna was not named after the Mexican General Santa Anna, but a Comanche chief named Santa Anna, or maybe even after Saint Anne, the grandmother of Jesus.

Santa Anna has a real old west look to it as I work my way into the center of the town, where the motor home is parked. The buildings look very much as they must have seventy-five years ago or more, except that now many of them are either empty or given over to crafts and antiques and similar stuff, and not to businesses that cater to the daily needs of the residents of the town (except their need for cash from people passing through, which is important).

Before becoming a railroad town along the Santa Fe line, Santa Anna was a camping spot for Texas Rangers. Also cattle drives from the south to the northern markets would go along a road between the mesas. So it really does have that western feel to it. I realize I’ll probably be able to say that about most of the towns from here on out, but it’s always fun when you see things for the first time.

Day 104: He's Down

Mullin to Brownwood. 22.9 miles/1944.9 total

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Another day, another walk. When will it all end? I’m leaving from just west of Mullin, on U.S. 183/84, heading through Zephyr, Early, and Brownwood.

One more sunny day, with a few high wispy clouds, expected to get into the high 70s. Right now it’s in the high 50s.

It’s a quiet Saturday morning. And it’s a bit of a slow news day. Not much happening. Jesus is dead, after all. He's down, taking the mandatory eight count for all us sinners, waiting to rise again tomorrow and deliver the knockout punch. But as the sign in front of a church in Goldthwaite said, “You can’t keep a good man down.” Reminds me somehow of a gay greeting card I saw once in a shop in Greenwich Village. On the outside it said, “It’s hard to keep a good man down.” And inside it said, “But fun trying.”

Don't the sun look angry through the trees,
Don't the trees look like crucified thieves.
--Warren Zevon, "Desperadoes Under the Eaves"

Today will be my longest official walk so far, although I’m not trying to bump up the distance. It’s just that by doing the extra little bit, I’ll walk right to Walmart parking lot where the motor home is parked. So I didn’t have to move it this morning—just drive the car back to the start.

The elevation is increasing slightly as I work my way to Abilene, a week or so distant. In fact, the elevation will continue to climb steadily all the way into and across New Mexico. Austin’s elevation was about 500 feet, Abilene’s is about 1700 feet, and Hobbs, New Mexico, where I’ll enter that state, is about 3,600 feet.

Mentioning the Battle of San Jacinto yesterday has me thinking about the unofficial Texas state song, “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” The Yellow Rose is thought by many to have been a mulatto (hence “yellow”) woman named Emily West, who came out to Texas as the indentured servant of a guy named Morgan, in 1835. She caught the eye of Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna as he swept through, and may have been occupying his attention when Sam Houston attacked Santa Anna’s troops on the afternoon of April 21, 1836, defeating the army and putting the general to flight until his capture the next day. It would be richly ironic if an African American woman was partially responsible for the victory of the Texans, which in turn ensured the reinstatement and survival of slavery in Texas. (Slavery had been abolished in the Republic of Mexico in 1829, by order of President Vicente Guerrero, himself an ex-slave of mixed African, Spanish, and Indian ethnicity.) Prior to the Civil War this version of the Yellow Rose facts, minus the specific identity of Emily West, was pretty well accepted, but since then the lyrics of the song have been altered to make it less racially specific.

I leave Mills County and enter Brown County. Brown County purports to be a boll weevil free area, with fines for bringing the bugs in. So I check my pockets, and they seem to boll weevil free.

Just before Zephyr I stop in at the cemetery. It’s a pretty large and modern graveyard. Some of the names are Petty, Blackstock, King, Horner, Hollingshead. I rest on the stone of Walter Cornelius.

Zephyr is a small unincorporated community of about 200. It has one open store and a blinking light. A trio of sixty-year-old Chevrolets rust in a field near the road. Zephyr also has a post office and something called the World Famous Zephyr Store. Must be famous in a world other than the one where I live. It’s closed, and has been for some time, as is Petty’s Grocery and Feed. As is, for that matter, something called The Little Green Store on 84.

Zephyr has had its ups and downs. First it was bypassed by the railroad, but it moved a mile east so it would be a railroad stop. Then in 1909 a tornado struck the town, demolishing much of it and killing 34 people. But they rebuilt, and by 1940 the population stood at 750, with a thriving local economy based on cotton farming. Then the boll weevil struck the cotton fields in the 40s and the population declined to 300, then to its present level, where it has remained. The good news, I suppose, is that if you get in your car and drive like a bat out of hell you can be in Brownwood in about ten minutes.

Next I enter Early, population 2,588. Early is a contiguous suburb of Brownwood, just to the east of that city. Early was named for Walter U. Early, who donated some of his land for schools. Early is home to the Heartland Mall, which also contains a movie theater. I have been told by locals that it is the hopping place in the Brownwood/Early metropolitan area, except when they’re having the annual rattlesnake roundup at the Brownwood Civic Center.

Highway 180/84 takes a turn to the left and goes pretty much due west, until U.S. 183 peels off to the north. I’ll leave 183, which I’ve been on for many miles now, and stay on 84.

At 22 miles I leave Early and enter Brownwood, population 20,407, crossing the bridge over Pecan Bayou. Before the bridge I pass Humphrey Pete’s Steakhouse, where I ate last night. Not bad.

Highway 84 is a busy commercial strip, with all the major restaurant chains, motels, lots of gas stations and stores. I’m working my way down to Walmart, which lies just past the intersection where Walgreen’s and CVS face off against each other from opposite corners. Sound familiar? It is.

Walmart comes into view. I don’t think I want to make a habit of walking this far in a day. It cuts into my leisure time too much. Like working overtime. And when you’re self-employed, overtime is no fun.

Compared To What?

Brownwood, Texas

Friday, April 2, 2010

Checked out Brownwood today, a city of over 20,000. I think most of them live in the parts I didn't go through, because the downtown was pretty deserted. The action is up here on Highway 84. There's one movie theater in town and it and Walmart are the social centers.

The Brown County Courthouse was closed for Good Friday. I guess I should have seen that coming. Not a big deal--it's a red brick "classical revival" building built in the second decade of the 20th century. Brownwood's story isn't all that interesting--cattle, railroads. The father of Brownwood was a New York-born guy named Greenleaf Fisk (1807-1888). According to the plaque in front of the courthouse, "As a boy he was so studious that he voluntarily gave up recess periods to read." This came as a surprise to me, because I didn't realize they had recess in the early 19th century. (I suspect the statement is one of those adult plots aimed at school children on field trips to the courthouse.) Well, evidently he wasn't too studious, because he abandoned his study for the Presbyterian ministry to take a boat down the Ohio River and eventually to Texas, where he settled in Mina (now Bastrop).

Greenleaf Fisk supposedly fought in the decisive Battle of San Jacinto and was greatly revered for that. I say "supposedly" because the Battle of San Jacinto lasted about eighteen minutes on the afternoon of April 21, 1836. Houston's army of 900 attacked while the Mexicans were taking their siesta (no joke), killed 630 Mexicans and lost nine of their own soldiers. So whether Fisk even had time to load his rifle is anyone's guess. Later he settled in this area and donated a tract of land for the establishment of Brownwood.

After visiting downtown I drove around the outskirts a bit and came upon a strange place called the Douglas MacArthur Academy of Freedom, which is housed in a limestone neo-Romanesque building with a wildly incongruous 1960's addition in the front. Imagine that someone took your ugly one-story suburban junior high school and jammed it into the front of a 19th century Methodist church. This "academy," according to the internet, houses a museum which recreates famous rooms in American History, like Independence Hall, and also has a 32-foot mural depicting Biblical history. Of course it was closed, because Jesus Christ was busy dying a slow and painful death on the cross this afternoon, and if there's one thing Texans take seriously, it's executions.

The MacArthur Academy of Freedom features a large bronze statue of General MacArthur in front of a mirrored glass window. This is important, because it shows off the rear of the statue. And what's interesting about that is that according to this sculptor's rendition, Douglas MacArthur had a pretty nice ass. That came as a bit of a shock to me, because from everything I'd seen previously (newsreels of the "I have returned" landing, and all that), I was under the impression that old Doug was a little wide in the hips and had sort of a flat, old white man's ass, not the slim waist and perky buttocks he has in the statue. Well, live and learn.

The Academy of Freedom is owned by Howard Payne University, a small Baptist outfit in Brownwood that boasts, among its past students, Paul and Paula, the duo who sang that early 60s hit, "Hey Paula."

Brownwood claims several more semi-famous sons and daughters, but I'll just mention two of them: the stripper Candy Barr, and a porn actress named Alexis Texas.

Afterwards I drove around some more, trying to find something decent to listen to on the radio, without much success. Most of it was country, or preaching, or worse yet that cloying and insidious "contemporary Christian music," where you think at first you're hearing some grunge song, then they start moaning about their lord and savior. Finally I got a rock station from Abilene, where they started in with "Crazy Train." I'm not the world's biggest Ozzie Osbourne fan, but I cranked it up, because there's no better antidote to Jesus rock than the Ozz man. And no better place than Texas to play a song by a guy who claims he was once arrested in San Antonio for urinating against the side of the Alamo.

I've listened to preachers,
I've listened to fools. . . .

I've been denied so far in my quest for goat meat, by the way. I looked in vain for a restaurant serving goat, and went into Walmart later to see if maybe they had some goat meat there. I asked the butcher, and he said they don't carry it. I said, "I just came through a county that says it's the meat goat capital of America, and you don't have any goat?" He said he has trouble selling lamb, let alone goat meat. "Trouble"--that's what he said. You could tell the guy wished it weren't so. "So where does all that goat meat go?" I asked. "I don't know. Probably overseas." I thought, overseas? That's odd. Goat is supposed to be the number one meat worldwide. Then I thought about the "meat goat capital of America" claim Mills county makes and realized it was, after all, a pretty small county. That might not be much of boast. Like saying "the socialism capital of America." Yeah. Compared to what?

Day 103: The Other Dark Meat

Eastern Mills County to Mullin, Texas. 22 miles/1922 total

Thursday, April 1, 2010

I start from an obscure point on the side of Highway 183 near County Road 330 in eastern Mills County, walking through the city of Goldthwaite and the town of Mullin, a distance of 22 miles.

It’s partly overcast this morning, although the clouds seem about to scatter and let the sun shine a bit. The temperature is in the 60s now, expected to rise to the mid-80s. The air feels more humid than usual. Rain is expected by this evening, and into tomorrow, so it’ll be a good day to take off. I am determined not to walk in the rain if I can help it. I’ve tried it, and it’s not fun. Even with good rain gear you get almost as damp underneath as you do on the outside.

About a mile into the walk I come across two fat goats grazing in a ditch near the road. Another mile on, I see a sign that says "Welcome to Mills County, Meat Goat Capital of America." So there you have it. Those were meaty looking goats.

Soon after that sign I see a flock of sheep and then some cattle, lest I think it’s all goats around here. The cattle breed advertised on the sign in front of the ranch is Limousin. A very old breed, from France, they are said to resemble the cattle drawn on caves 20,000 years ago. I’ve seen Limousin bulls, and they are truly massive, and long-bodied--like limousines, in fact. They use them down here to increase the size of other breeds of cattle.

But back to goats. Watching several small herds of goats near the road has made me hungry for goat meat, which you don’t get much of in this country. I think the last time I had goat was in Connecticut, in some Jamaican-style dish. Curried goat or jerked goat. Maybe in Brownwood, where I’ll be staying for the next few nights, they’ll have a restaurant serving locally-grown goat.

Goats eye me warily as I pass, as if they’ve overheard me talking into my recorder about goat meat. Goat—the other dark meat.

I enter Goldthwaite, population 1802, passing the Masonic Hall, with the symbols of the Masons and the Order of the Eastern Star out front. The latter is the upside down pentagram, a little satanic. It is also a depiction of the head of a goat, beard down, horns up, ears out. The form the devil takes. Others have viewed this with alarm, and labeled the OES as satanic. It’s hard to believe the old blue-haired Eastern Star women are witches or devil-worshippers. And if they are, well that takes away quite a bit of the mystique of witchcraft, doesn’t it? Cooking pancake breakfasts by day, conjuring up Lucifer by night. Like those banal old Satanists in Rosemary’s Baby.

Despite its dinky population, Goldthwaite presents itself as a full-fledged city. After the Masonic Hall I go by a sizable municipal park, complete with a large pre-fabricated playground, a stream, and several acres of shaded picnic areas. A possum, looking out of place in the daytime, shuffles along the rivulet and into a culvert. Ornamental trees, flowering purple, are in full bloom here.

A large banner across Highway 183 promises the annual Goat Cook-Off on the 4th Saturday in April. That’s the story of my life on this trip—I’ll be long gone by then. All the celebrations in the cities I’ve gone through seem to happen when I’m not there. I missed South by Southwest in Austin by a week or so. And then there are the others—catfish festivals, crawfish festivals, coon suppers, the giant omelet.

Uphill I go past the Napa auto parts place and the Wagonwheel Restaurant. I stop into the 1888 limestone block building housing the Chamber of Commerce, and promising an Old Jail Museum. But when I get inside I’m told the old jail, upstairs, isn’t open to the public because it’s being used to house county records while the Mills County Courthouse undergoes renovations. Right next door the courthouse is surrounded with scaffolding, and closed. Well, in a county this small, about 5,000, I don’t imagine the loss of the courthouse for a few months is a big imposition. Go to the next county for your justice. Or maybe to the Baptist Church.

I stop in at the Mills County Historical Museum and spend a pleasant forty minutes looking at the exhibits--just miscellaneous old stuff--and chatting with one of the volunteers, a guy named Rich. He tells me his great grandfather came from Schoolcraft, Michigan, and we talk about Michigan and Texas. I tell him the little I remember about Henry Schoolcraft, that he was an Indian agent in Mackinac City, married to a half-Ojibwa woman, and that he had a tendency to invent faux Indian names, a number of which he gave to Michigan counties--Alpena, Kalkaska, Tuscola, Oscoda, and more.

The locals pronounce Goldthwaite “Gold-wait.” The town was named after a railroad guy when it was started by the Santa Fe railroad in the 1880s. A familiar story. Rich told me that Goldthwaite is very close to the geographic center of Texas, so I’ll consider that at this point I’m halfway across the state. That’s a pretty daunting thought, because I’ve already been walking in Texas for twenty days.

As I head out of town U.S. 84 joins U.S. 183 for the rest of the way into Brownwood. In addition to the usual roadkill—lots of deer, possums, raccoons, skunks—I’m increasingly seeing small furry things I can’t identify, mostly because they’ve been flattened and mangled so much. They look like little monsters from a Mercer Mayer book. I should be getting better at identifying roadkill, but I still see lots of things I that are just bits of leathery skin and fur. Rabbit? Rat?

I’m struck not only by how many people are offering me rides, but by the fact that sometimes they’ve driven a good deal out of their way to make the offers. That's what makes them so hard to turn down. Yesterday someone saw the motor home and remembered seeing me from few miles back, so they turned around and drove back until they saw me again and offered me a ride to the motor home. That’s also happened at the beginning of a walk when people see the car. That's generosity above and beyond.

I step across the road to get a close look at a black sheep standing near a fence. The sheep is black, but the wool is white. It looks like a drawing in a book my brother and I had, illustrating the nursery rhyme “Baa Baa Black Sheep.” The sheep looks back at me without a trace of fear or even comprehension.

Cresting a hill before Mullin I pass a pasture in which llamas, or vicunas, or alpacas (I never know which of those long-necked animals is which) are grazing next to goats and sheep, looking as if they know they’re on the wrong continent. They seem more nervous than their fellow ruminants, trotting back and forth along the fence.

Where Route 573 crosses Highway 183/84 I enter Mullin, population 175. The clouds are beginning to thicken along the western horizon. Less than two miles to go, and I am weary. The motor home comes into view just on the other side of the hundredth hill of the day.

Day 102: Snakes On The Move

Lampasas to eastern Mills County. 21.9 miles/1900 total

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

I'm on the side of US 183 about four miles west of Lampasas, going through Lometa, then ten miles past that to somewhere on the side of the road about three miles inside Mills County.

It’s another nearly cloudless day. It’s becoming like a cliché. Temperature in the 60s, heading up into the mid-80s.

Now that I’m truly out in the country again, probably for the first time since arriving in east Texas, there’s no shortage of people offering me rides, waving at me, and generally being friendly. It confirms my belief that such behavior is characteristic of country folks no matter whether they’re in Indiana or the south or here in Texas. They seem to want to be decent on a personal level in spite of their grimly uncharitable political views.

About three miles into the walk I get stopped by two Texas state troopers. They pull off the road in front of me and both get out of the car—you know how they do, cautiously, with their hands on their guns. The driver, the taller of the two, who towers about a foot over me and does most of the talking, says they were just checking to see if I was all right because I looked “out of place,” or something like that. But of course that wouldn’t have required them to get out of the car. Any number of cops have pulled over to check if I was okay, and most barely even come to a complete stop. But these guys are very polite.

Something tells me, with these two cops standing there, that this is the time for full disclosure, so I tell them I'm walking across the country. Naturally this piques their interest somewhat, and the tall one says, quite perceptively, “You’re traveling kind of light to be walking across the country.” I tell him I have a motor home where I stay at night, so I don’t need to carry much with me. The tall one asks me where I'm from and I tell him I'm from Michigan, on my way to California. The other one asks where the motor home is. I tell him it's parked by the side of the road in the next county, about 18 miles away. He nods, as if this somehow computes. I think they might have seen it already. These are state police, so their range, like that of large predatory animals, is apt to be quite vast.

“So how did you get down here? Did you have somebody drop you off?” They are trying to figure it out. And now they're curious, having I think dropped whatever suspicions they might have had that I was dangerous.

“I drove my car. You see, I tow a car behind the motor home, and I use it to go back to the beginning of the walk.”

“Is that your car on the side of the road, back by Lampasas?”

“Yes it is.” They've been all over the place this morning.

The tall one is getting the idea, but still doesn’t have it all figured out. “So how do you do this whole thing?”

“Well, it’s like this. I drive the motor home with the car to the place I’m going to walk to, then I park the motor home, take the car off the dolly, drive it back to the place where I’m going to start walking, park the car, and walk from the car to the motor home. That’s what I’m doing now—walking to the motor home.”

They're nodding now. I am, frankly, impressed. Most peoples’ eyes begin to glaze over at this point.

“Then when I get to the motor home, I’ll drive it back down to the car, put the car on the dolly, and drive down to Lampasas, where I’m spending the night tonight. Then tomorrow I’ll drive the motor home and the car to a point about 21 miles beyond where it is today, and do it all over again.”

At this point a little smile is playing at the edges of the tall one’s mouth. The other one is smirking. I’ve been doing okay, but I’ve just stepped over the line. I know it immediately. The smiles say that while they know I'm not a danger to myself or others, I'm not quite right, either.

It comes down to this. What I do every day I walk, which I’ve done almost a hundred times now (the first few days in September I stayed at home at night and used the car and my bicycle), involves five steps. And most people can only stay with me for three steps. This seems to be the limit of the attention span of the average person, created by operative conditioning by means, I'm pretty sure, of the average interval between commercials on television.

Step one is driving the motor home and the car to point B. Step two is driving the car back to point A. Step three is walking from point A to point B. After that something happens inside peoples’ brains, and instead of picturing the motor home and the car, they begin to see something akin to the antics of one of those guys on the Ed Sullivan Show who’s spinning plates on top of sticks while juggling Indian clubs and balancing on a plank thrown across a large cylinder. Or maybe some elaborate cartoon plot by Wile E. Coyote to get the Roadrunner with a contraption he bought from the Acme Company, complete with slapstick penny whistle music.

The point is, I have lost these guys, just like I lose almost everybody. For the walking itself, there is endless interest and even some respect. For the logistics, there is very little of either.

They both shake their heads, bemused. Then the tall one says, “Why are you doing this, anyway?” It always does come down to that, doesn’t it? I give him the usual mishmash of answers, beginning with “to see if I can do it,” and dribbling on into a recitation of how friendly everyone is.

Now they know they're talking to a harmless crank, and they're eager to get on with whatever more serious work they have ahead of them.

“Just be careful out there and watch the cars,” the tall one says.

“Okay. I stay as far off the road as I can” I say, gesturing to the wide expanse of grass off to the side.

The other one glances at the grass and says, “Watch out down there. The snakes are starting to move.”

But the tall one wants to have the last word. “First watch the cars,” he says, “then watch the snakes.” And they're on their way.

Immediately I make a note to myself to check out the proper first aid procedures for rattlesnake bites. I think they've changed since I was a Boy Scout. The tourniquet and the knife are out, if I remember right. Too bad, because everything in Boy Scouts always seemed to come down to a tourniquet and a knife. You can build a bridge with a tourniquet and a knife.

At ten miles I begin to come into the outskirts of Lometa. I’m welcomed by the Lion’s Club, the Masons, the Eastern Star, the Boy Scouts, the FFA, the FHA, and the Methodists and Baptists.

A fence along the way has some large black things hanging from it. I can’t tell what they are, but when I get closer I see they’re huge catfish heads. Some of them are a foot square, and they’re all dried up and blackened, a dozen of them.

Lometa, population 782, begins about a mile later. Here’s a historical marker, talking about the Scholten Railroad, a 25-mile narrow gauge railway that operated from 1912 to 1925, carrying cedar posts and pilings from around here to West Texas. The Scholten brothers were Dutch, it says. I know that cedar posts were an important part of the construction of barbed wire fences, so that must have been what they were up to.

Lometa was started as a railroad town in 1886, for the Santa Fe Railroad, which still runs through the city, now the BNSF. Originally the town was called Montvale, and I don’t know why it was changed to Lometa, or what that signifies.

Highway 183 widens to five lanes through downtown Lometa, evidently to handle the heavy rush hour traffic in this town of 782. There is also a traffic light, and sidewalks, too. All this is a little on the optimistic side, if you ask me.

At the main intersection there are two or three antique stores and a bank. Next to that is the Shell station and convenience store, where I stop for something to drink. Next door to that is a spiffy drive-through beer store.

I leave Lampasas County and enter Mills County, named for John T. Mills, a pre-Civil War justice of the Texas supreme court, who was born in Ireland. Its county seat is Goldthwaite, through which I’ll be walking tomorrow.

I’m almost to the motor home. I got another eight ride offers today, in addition to my visit with the state troopers. Two of the offers were from military personnel in uniform, one Army and the other Air Force. Both of these guys looked like they were in amazingly good shape, youthful and vigorous, and their demeanor was like that of Boy Scouts solicitous of an old codger. “Are you okay, sir?” Tourniquets and knives at the ready.

Day 101: Saratoga of the South

Briggs to Lampasas. 21.8 miles/1878.1 total

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Here I stand on a hilltop with an almost 360 degree vista, heading north on Highway 183 through Lampasas, and then a few miles past the city, to another deserted spot on Highway 183. There’s nothing to speak of between here and Lampasas, or thereafter, but the gray-green hills, covered with evergreen bushes and oaks. And the barbed wire, of course.

It’s another beautiful day, mostly cloudless, in the high 50s, heading for the low 80s. A gentle breeze is blowing.

Increasingly, the men I see in this part of Texas look like Randy Quaid with a big blondish-white handlebar moustache. And of course a cowboy hat. Randy Quaid is a Texan, and he looks more Texan than most Texans do. No mistaking him for a pointy-headed member of the eastern liberal establishment. Shit no.

The soil of the hill country is thin and rocky in many places, which makes it difficult to cultivate. With that in mind, I guess the best bet has always been to raise animals that can eat the grass and don’t mind stepping around a rock or two—cattle mostly, and goats and sheep to a smaller degree. The Europeans who came to New England found rocky soil, too, but were confined to their little area by their small numbers and fear of the unknown—Indians, forests, and so on. So they laboriously took the rocks out of the soil and built fences with them and did the best they could for a hundred years or more, until they knew it was more or less safe to go west. Back then the "west" was no further than what is now the western ends of Pennsylvania and New York, and maybe Ohio. But as soon as they could do it, they deserted their poor New England farms and left. The people who came out here, in the mid-1800s, must have been comparatively sophisticated about the conditions they were going to encounter, and must have had cattle in mind all along.

I come to Watson, which like Briggs is marked only by a small sign with its name on it. There’s the tiny Chapel Hill Methodist Church, which looks like it could hold no more than about 25 souls. Past that is the Watson Cemetery. I cross the road to take a look at the dead of Watson. I see Elliotts, Coxes, Jubys, Smiths, Morgans, and, not surprisingly, a number of Watsons, including J. Ed Watson, who lived from 1880 to 1980, and came to within less than a month of reaching the century mark. Next to him lies his wife Verlie. The name J. Ed Watson strikes me as quintessentially Texan.

Up at the northern end of Watson is the Kifaru Exotic Animal and Bird Auction. The next auction isn’t until May 1 and 2, and there appear to be no beasts in the pens in back. God only know what kinds of ridiculous out-of-place animals they deal in here. It’ll probably be because of a place like Kifaru that the Malthusian plague everybody fears will be loosed on the earth—monkey-borne Marburg virus, or something.

On the other hand, the history of the earth since mankind has inhabited it, and no doubt before that, has been characterized by the moving of species from one place to another—by birds, on the backs of mammals, in spores that blow for miles and miles—so what the hell. Europeans brought rats and horses and mosquito-borne malaria and syphilis and all kinds of plants to the New World—species we know and love today, like cotton and coffee. At one time camels roamed the southwestern desert in the U.S. And it went the other way, too. The rest of the world got tomatoes, potatoes, tobacco, cacao, and any number of other wonderful plants from North and South America. Good thing no one got their shorts in a knot about the importation of alien species back then. Who knows what the Europeans would be doing now, with nothing to smoke, no chocolate, no sauce for their pasta, no spuds. With little else but booze and herring, the Dutch, I’m sure, would have lost the will to live long ago.

Sometimes I think humans have a pathological need to get worried and upset about things over which they have little or no control—species traveling from one part of the world to another, species going extinct, glaciers melting, cows farting methane into the air. Bill Bryson, in A Walk in the Woods, talks about the demise of the American chestnut tree, which was all but wiped out by a fungus during the first few decades of the twentieth century. He calls it a “tragedy.” When I heard it I thought, “No, that’s not a tragedy, Bill. A tragedy is a form of rhetorical drama, of Greek origin, in which the extreme actions of a usually noble human hero are juxtaposed with the actions of the gods or with forces of fate or nature, and where the hero’s ambition or flaw causes him and others to come to untimely ends. Oedipus Rex is a tragedy; Doctor Faustus is a tragedy; Hamlet is a tragedy. The demise of the American chestnut tree, on the other hand, is merely an example of one species of plant succumbing to another.” But that’s just me being a stickler for details.

Perhaps closer to a tragedy is our human insistence on imagining that we can keep things the way we think they were when we were kids, or when our parents were growing up, at the same time as our numbers and our appetites are increasing in such a way as to render even such an ambition, much less its dubious achievement, a ludicrous impossibility. Not only is it a waste of time, but it interferes with our enjoyment of what we’re in the middle of right now and makes us feel unnecessarily guilty about our future.

Well, I’ve had four ride offers so far today, and it’s only noon. The road is lightly traveled, and those who travel on it tend to go a long way, so they’ve probably seen my car parked off the road a few miles back and figure I’m going for gas, or something.

At a little over halfway I enter Lampasas County, and see a billboard for the first time today. This one says, “Experience Historic Downtown Lampasas.” And I did experience it, yesterday. First I visited the handsome 1883 Lampasas County Courthouse, built of limestone in the Italianate and Victorian styles, with three stories topped by a clock tower, and red mansard roofs. Inside, the courthouse is strictly functional, with courtrooms on the first and second floors and smaller rooms on the third, probably used sometimes as jury deliberation rooms. And on the walls of these rooms are photographs from Lampasas history—floods, building projects, judges, sheriffs.

Outside on the lawn of the courthouse several historical markers tell of interesting events. One was the so-called Horrell-Higgins feud. The Horrell brothers—Tom, Mart, Merritt, and Sam—were apparently your basic lowlifes, known throughout the region for criminal activities, including cattle rustling and murder. In 1876 a guy named Pink Higgins accused the Horrell brothers of stealing his cattle, and on January 22, 1877, Pink Higgins shot and killed Merritt Horrell in a saloon. This began a feud between the Horrell family and Higgins and a few friends of his. There was a shootout on the town square (probably on the spot where the marker now stands), in which one man on each side was killed. A couple of years later Tom and Mart Horrell were killed in their jail cell in the town of Meridian by a vigilante mob. This left only one Horrell brother, Sam, who took the hint and retired to Oregon and died of old age. This sounds less like a feud to me than the systematic extermination of a family of miscreants.

But the standout thing about Lampasas is that is was the site of several mineral springs, which became quite an attraction and turned Lampasas into a spa, which at one time had a 200-room hotel. I visited one of the old springs last evening. It’s just an old fashioned swimming pool, built of limestone in the 1870s or 80s. It smells vaguely of sulphur, and empties into Sulphur Creek. People came to take the waters, which were considered curative and very healthy. The spa flourished until the end of the century, and earned the town the sobriquet “Saratoga of the South.”

All of which makes me wonder why spas like that have pretty much ceased being meccas for people seeking good health from the waters. I guess it’s because, with the advent of indoor plumbing, people began to become cleaner in their own homes, and didn’t need to go to mineral springs. In other words, it wasn’t the minerals in the water that were curative, it was the fact that people were taking baths more often. Back in the middle of the 19th century it wasn’t common to bathe much at all. One imagines that well-to-do people who came to Lampasas and Saratoga and the great spas of Europe smelled a hell of a lot better when they left than when they arrived. And they must have been healthier, too, for having washed the funky grime off themselves—the parasites, the staph bacteria, the crud. No wonder it was curative! Not to mention the stimulating process of taking off all those clothes, getting naked (something people rarely did back then), putting on bathing suits, then afterwards dressing in clean clothes. Even though the men and women at spas bathed in separate facilities, when a couple got back together they must have found one another much more attractive. A salutary process indeed.

I enter the city limits of Lampasas, population 6,786. At the bottom of the hill, where U.S. 183 crosses U.S. 190 (with Ft. Hood military base 27 miles to the east), is the Saratoga Motel. From my vantage point up here at the top I can see pretty much the whole of Lampasas—McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Dairy Queen, the water tower, Hoffpauir Ford, the ridge of hills to the north beyond the city.

I’m about three or four blocks west of the historical downtown, but since I’ve seen what there is to see, I won’t walk though it today. Somewhere downtown is the office of Jimmie Don Aycock, the Texas state congressman from around here. "Howdy, Ah'm Jimmie Don Aycock, and ah wunna be yur ruprusunnative in Austin."

I do stop at Skinny’s Fina gas station store for some refreshment. I’ll give Skinny’s my business today because they were kind enough to let me fill the water tank of the motor home last evening, and (unbeknownst to them) to dump a large bag of trash in their dumpster. Thanks, Skinny.

After I get north of the city, Highway 183 heads off to the northwest again, this time going slightly more west than north. Up here it’s not a four-lane highway with no shoulder, like it was south of town, but a two- and three-lane highway with rather wide shoulders. Wide enough to drive on, as a matter of fact, which a number of drivers insist on doing, using it to pass on the right, notwithstanding the solid white line between the shoulder and the real lane. Interesting.

I’m getting more ride offers than at any other time in Texas so far—eight today, and only five before today. I appreciate the offers and have a hard time turning them down. Somehow, in the three seconds or so I have to talk to the people, I manage to make them understand that I want to walk, in response to which they invariably say, “Oh, you’re exercising!” Yes, I suppose I am.

Day 100: One Hundred Days of Solitude

Seward Junction to Briggs. 20.8 miles/1856.3 total

Sunday, March 28, 2010

From the roadside near Seward Junction I'm heading north by northwest on U.S. 183 toward a spot about four miles past Briggs, in the middle of nowhere.

Yet another cloudless day, but not as warm as yesterday, and very windy. I believe the official forecast is for the temperature to reach the high 60s, but with the wind it feels pretty cool.

I am now outside the urban ambit of Austin, beyond the northern suburbs, which I think semi-officially end at Leander, through which I walked yesterday. In fact, I saw on the news that just yesterday they opened a commuter train station in Leander, part of the Austin mass transit system, although the opening ceremony was long finished by the time I arrived there in the middle of the afternoon. And not a soul remained. Nor did I see a single train. But it was a nice-looking station.

Today is my 100th day of walking. One hundred days of solitude, as it were. To observe the day, some statistics about the walk so far are in order. The first one is easy—don’t even need a calculator. My average daily distance is 18.563 miles. Considering that I started out with wimpier distances and only had my first 20-mile walk on day 31, I guess that’s not bad. And the average is going up every day.

On the other hand, it has been 202 days since I started the project, on September 8, 2009, which means that I have not walked on 102 days, more than half the time. (That brings the real daily average down to 9.189 miles.) So what have I done with those 102 days of not walking? I went back and checked my records this morning. On 67 days I was either at home or en route to or from home. That leaves 35 days off on the road in the motor home or with friends. So my ratio of walking days to off days on the road is 2.85 to 1. That could stand some improvement, although some of those days off on the road have been for the purpose of visiting cities and friends. In general my habit has been to walk three days and rest one, a ratio of 3 to 1, not bad considering that before I started I figured I would walk five days and rest two, which would have been a ratio of only 2.5 to 1. Some might wonder why I don’t just walk every day I can and not take days off. It would be possible. But I find that I do better when I have a little time to do laundry, chores in connection with the motor home, and to relax. It may be the thing that has kept me going, since my walking days, from the time I get up to when I finish blogging, usually last at least 14 hours.

Well, there certainly are no rules here except the ones I have imposed on myself. I've enjoyed all my days off, both at home and in transit. But having said that, I will allow that I somehow feel compelled to increase the number of walking days and the length of the walks. I could be in California by now, or very nearly so, had I taken fewer breaks. After all, you’re not paying me to hang around the motor home and do nothing, are you? Come to think of it, you’re not paying me at all. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that . . . .

Still, I’ll be taking tomorrow off, because I’m out of clean underwear and I have a few other things to do.

I happen to be listening, on my iPod, to a book on CD by Bill Bryson, called A Walk in the Woods, about his hiking of the Appalachian Trail in 1996. That’s a humbling thing to contemplate, because that kind of hiking really is challenging in a way this is not. Carrying everything on one’s back and camping every night, walking up hill and down dale in all kinds of weather, and even then doing maybe 15 miles a day, now that’s serious hiking. I’ve walked small pieces of that trail in Vermont and New Hampshire, and it’s far more rigorous than this roadside walking ever gets. (Still, I just listened to a passage where he bitches and moans mightily about how treacherous it is to walk along six-lane pedestrian-unfriendly highways in urban areas and how intolerable it is that there are so few sidewalks in America, blah blah blah. I thought, a little smugly, “Welcome to my world, you big baby.”)

About two and a half miles into the walk I cross the North San Gabriel River, whose water is clear and whose river bed is emerald green.

A word about the weather here in Texas. Over the past several years the state has been undergoing a drought, but this year, thanks to an El Nino (don't ask me what that is), they’ve had a greater than normal amount of rainfall. The reservoirs and rivers are just about at normal levels now. Of course the very idea of “normal” in the context of weather is only based on statistical history. We make the mistake of assuming that because the weather has behaved a certain way in the past, say over the previous one hundred years, that it will or should behave in a certain way this year, which is not the case. In reality, each year, and indeed each day, the weather behaves exactly as it should—or rather, as it does—without regard to either the past or the future. The weather is not a school child or a trained animal. Indeed, there’s nothing to say that it should ever rain in central Texas again, until the end of time.

When things go “wrong” weatherwise (meaning when there is “too little” rainfall, or when there are “too many” hurricanes, for example), we’re quick to blame human activities for those changes, and we like to think that only selfish fools and greedy corporate villains are responsible. Rarely do we stop to consider that what we want from the weather is for it to do things that help us, pretty much without regard to anything else. Even our worries about the loss of other species ultimately centers on what those losses will do to us.

Meanwhile we rut and reproduce and continue to increase in numbers. And why not? That's what we do best. The biggest mistake in all this is the handwringing some people do about it, as if they actually had any power over any of it. Think Jethro Tull, Locomotive Breath:

In the shuffling madness
Of the locomotive breath,
Runs the all-time loser,
Headlong to his death.
He feels the piston scraping,
Steam breaking on his brow,
. . .
God stole the handle
And the train it won’t stop going—
No way to slow down.

Each time I reach the top of a long rolling rise I can see yet another gradual rise that looks just a little higher, a mile or so in the distance. The elevation of Austin is about 500 feet and that of Lampasas, the next city I’ll reach, is a bit over 1000 feet.

Let me try to describe the countryside up here. It’s gently rolling, with vast tracts of grassy pasture, dotted everywhere with small cedar or juniper trees, some no bigger than bushes, varying in height from about five to perhaps thirty feet. Cattle graze, spread out wide over the land, on ranches that appear several times larger than those in East Texas. And everywhere—I mean everywhere—there are barbed wire fences. Practically no land is unfenced. In the far distance, beyond the cattle and the bushes, are more ridges and the occasional knobby or flat hilltop, all covered with cedars and oaks. This is, in short, what most out-of-staters envision when they think of Texas.

And wildflowers, as always. Many species. Today I’m noticing some delicate white ones with pale purple streaks on the inner sides of the petals, making them look like fine china teacups. Evening primroses, I think they are.

At about 12.5 miles I leave Williamson County and enter Burnet County, named for David Gouverneur Burnet, first president, and also a vice president, of the Republic of Texas. He was a New Jersey boy, having been born in Newark. He once got into a shouting match with Sam Houston, his successor, and called him a “half Indian.” Houston responded by calling Burnet a “hog thief,” and Burnet challenged Houston to a duel, which the latter refused to fight.

I come to Prairie View Cemetery, dating to the early 1890s. In front are four huge stones of members of the Greene family, which stand like chunks of Stonehenge. The wind has been blowing steadily for several hours, and up here by the graveyard it comes into my face at about twenty miles per hour, as if trying to hold me back.

After the cemetery the land flattens out for several miles until Briggs, a tiny community located on a spur off of Highway 183. I opt to stay on 183, though, because there’s a store just past the fork in the road. Besides, I went through Briggs earlier today, and there isn’t much to see. It’s been a long time since the prospect of going through a tiny village has tempted me to take a detour, especially when on the main road there’s Jack’s General Store and gas station, where for the first time today I’ll be able to get some refreshment. By “refreshment” I don’t mean just comestibles, because I’m perfectly capable of packing enough food and drink for an entire day’s walking, and really don’t need these stops. No, the kind of refreshment I’m referring to is that of being in a store with other people. And who could resist a place that has the words “FOOD & FUN” written in six-foot black letters on its sheet metal roof?

Well, there’s food here, but I don’t know what the fun is supposed to be. Maybe the fun doesn’t start until after dark.

The road starts to go downhill after Briggs, evidently toward a river valley. The motor home comes into view, perched on the at a bit of an angle. I'm really closer to Watson than to Briggs now, but Watson will have to wait until next time.

Day 99: Cocktails for Two

Austin to Seward Junction. 21.6 miles/1835.5 total

Saturday, March 27, 2010

This morning I leave my car at the parking lot of Target near the intersection of 183 and 360, Capital of Texas Highway, on the north side of Austin. I'll be heading up 183 north by northwest to Seward Junction.

It’s another cloudless day, about 60 now, expected to get into the low 80s. For the first time in months I’m beginning the walk in a short-sleeved shirt.

The competition for the spare change of the people of greater Austin goes on unabated, here where suburban side streets meet the highway access road and people have to wait for lights. Hard luck stories are stationed at almost every intersection, with their cardboard signs and meager possessions. The competition seems to be not just for the money, but also to see who can come with the most interesting, original, or guilt-producing pitch to the motoring public. You already know my opinion about the pitch. I think the simplest of social contracts would be best—“Please give me some money. Thank you.” Or as they used to say in my business, “Thank you in advance for your cooperation.”

Nevertheless these mendicants insist on relating little stories. And who can blame them? They live in a society that seems to demand answers or explanations for everything. Mere begging, without more, reduces you to a peon of such low stature as to be hardly worth bothering with. Like a blind, legless waif in the streets of Mumbai. Look away. It's horrible. Whatever ills in American society have reduced these people to panhandling have also made them want to engage in it as a sort of commercial activity. They insist on trying to sell themselves to us, just like everyone else sells everything else.

I pass one guy with a sign that says, “Need Groceries for 2.” I suppose that’s designed to make him look like a person who wants more than money in his pocket, who has someone else to care for—maybe a child or a poor sick wife. I wonder if many people respond to that kind of thing? I know I don’t. Which isn’t to say that I don’t give money to beggars. I sometimes do, but as I’ve said I prefer the direct approach. Still, the guy might just be telling it like it is, and does need groceries for two. Or cocktails for two.

In some secluded rendezvous
That overlooks the avenue,
With someone sharing a delightful chat
Of this and that
With cocktails for two.

I can see them now, high up on the slope under the overpass, surrounded by plastic empties, gazing into one another's watery eyes. I think Spike Jones would approve of the image.

Another sign says (and here’s a man after my own heart), “Not Homeless, Houseless. Texas Is My Home.” That one uses the local pride factor to tug at the heartstrings. It says, Here’s a local guy who ran into some hard luck, but he’s one of us. And that’s not a bad approach, I’m thinking. Because one of the things people out here on the street corners have to do is to keep from being consigned to a category that makes them part of the Other. They’re trying to get folks to identify with their plight. It’s the old But for the Grace of God pitch. I complimented this guy on his sign, but he looked at me suspiciously, as if I were making fun of him. Here’s one somebody should try some time: a sign that says simply, “I Used To Be Just Like You.”

So I wonder how much these folks clear on a Saturday, after expenses? (Just kidding about the expenses.) I’m tempted to try it for a day, but I wouldn’t want to take away scarce resources from someone who needs them. Besides, there’s the chance I could end up encroaching on someone’s territory or be caught without a union card. Maybe I could find a spot and sit there with a sign that reads, “Hi. I Don’t Need Any Money, But I’d Still Like Some Of Yours.”

The access road up 183 provides a variety of sights—hospitals, drug stores, restaurants, car dealerships, restaurants (Joe's Crab Shack; Chuy's Texmex), and every manner of fast food place. Eat and Go. Grab and Eat. Stop and Stuff. Snatch and Gobble.

I received news this morning of the death of a high school classmate of mine (and of some readers as well)—Norman Sluiter, who died at the age of 64. Norman was what we used to call retarded. Today there are ways of saying that which involve many more syllables. He graduated in the Waterford Kettering High School class of ’67, which means he was about 21 years old at the time. I guess they figured it was time to let Norman go, before he got older than some of the teachers. Anyway, he attended our reunions (although I didn’t see him at the last one). I remember that at the 20th reunion he was voted the person who had changed least from high school. Indeed. The obituary said he was a self-employed maintenance man, though I was under the impression he had worked for some years in the exciting world of fast food. No matter. Norman is up there pushing a broom in the halls of Valhalla now. So I am dedicating today’s walk to Norman Sluiter. And, as they say out east, not for nothing am I doing so, because Norman probably did more walking, up and down the roads of Waterford, than most of us have done. Certainly more than me. As far as I know he never qualified for a driver’s license, so he had to walk all the time. I think he even walked to a few of the reunions.

I leave Austin and enter Cedar Park, a contiguous suburb whose population was estimated in 2009 at over 62,000. Here Highway 183 is just like 28th Street in Grand Rapids, or maybe Telegraph over in the Detroit area. Just a string of businesses and parking lots and tons of traffic.

I would have guessed that Cedar Park was a new town, but not so. It was begun in the mid-1800s, when it was known as Running Brushy. The Clucks, Harriet and George, sort of got it going when they settled here in 1873. Then the railroad came through and connected it with Austin to the south and Burnet and Lampasas to the north. At that time it was called Bruggerhoff, after a railroad guy, but people didn’t like that name. It was too hard to spell and pronounce (two reasons why no one will ever name a town after me, even if I do work for the railroad). So in 1887 Emmett Cluck, son of George and Harriet and the principal landowner in the town, changed its name again, to Cedar Park. People used to take the train up here from Austin a hundred years ago and stroll around.

Right next to the big snazzy “W” of the Whataburger is the smaller, more rounded “W” of a place called Wienerschnitzel, which purports to be the largest hot dog chain restaurant in the world. In der Welt, don’t you know. Evidently these people don’t know or care that Wiener schnitzel isn’t a hot dog, or any other kind of sausage, but a breaded veal cutlet. Nor did they know or care, when they started out calling themselves Der Wienerschnitzel, that the correct article isn’t der but das. Who knew that naming a restaurant could involve so much knowledge?

I see a young guy holding up a sign for some business at a street corner and I stop to ask him if he’d mind telling me how much he gets paid to stand there with the sign. We get to talking and it turns out he’s from Ypsilanti, Michigan, recently out of the army, settled in Austin. Small world. Oh, by the way, he gets fifteen dollars an hour, a bit more than I expected.

There’s an old cemetery in front of the New Hope First Baptist Church at the corner of New Hope and Highway 183. Right over the fence lie members of the Trammel family, and also some descendants of the founding family, the Clucks—Aaron and Frances. Actually, Frances isn’t in there yet, and she’s 100 years old as of last September. Hanging back.

The sign says I’m leaving Cedar Park, and immediately I enter Leander, population 22,379. Another railroad town, named for Leander “Catfish” Brown, a railroad official. And get this: they found a female human skeleton dating back 10,000 or more years here, and called it the Leanderthal Lady.

Two or three miles north of Leander I’m pretty much out in the country again. It’s not the absolute desolate country, punctuated as it is with water towers and power lines. But it’s hilly. They say this is the beginning of the Texas Hill Country, although I think I’ll be skirting it to the north. These hills are green and tree-covered, and limestone rock sticks up from the soil in outcroppings and loose stones everywhere. The trees are mostly cedar and oak, both somewhat scrubby, rarely seeming to reach much over thirty feet.

I cross the South San Gabriel River, and when I reach the entrance to a new housing development called Summerlyn I have about two and a half miles to go. Soon I see a sign for Seward Junction, but this is really not much more than the crossroads of Highway 183 and Texas Route 29. Seward Junction appears to be part of a community called Liberty Hill, centered a few miles to the west on 29. Liberty Hill is a city of a bit over 1,400, first settled in the 1850s by people from the Carolinas and Tennessee who came for the land that was offered.

With less than a mile to go, feeling the fatigue of the day, I stop to perch on a galvanized guard rail, my favorite place to sit. I sit on the rail and tuck my legs up and rest my heels on the lower lip of the rail. I look around me over the countryside at some of my favorite sights—a Valero station and a Shell station, each with its convenience store. I’m well-stocked at the moment, but it’s good to know that they’re there if I need them, with coffee, soft drinks, and those two-for-a-dollar peanuts. Or even a Blue Bell ice cream bar.

I get up and walk, and not far past Seward Junction I spy the big white rear end of the motor home, with its Continental kit over the bumper. When I registered the motor home back in the fall of 2008 the letters on the license plate they gave me were BWA, so I immediately thought of a mnemonic to make sure I remembered them, and it was Big White Ass, which seemed appropriate, since the back end of the vehicle is white and big. So there it sits.