Blue Highways: Austin, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapNon-Texans may not agree, but there is a little bit of heaven perched on the edge of the desert in Texas - Austin (and San Antonio, where I lived).  William Least Heat-Moon notes Austin on his way past, since he doesn't want to spend time in the urban areas.  But we'll take a little stop so I can reminisce about Austin and traveling up there a few times a year to do and see interesting things.  Click on the map thumbnail at right and see just how far we are across Texas, and how far we have to go.

Book Quote

"At Austin, on a hill west of the Colorado River - not the Colorado River, but the one flowing from near the New Mexico line to the Gulf - the desert began. Desert as in dry, rocky, vast. There was nothing gradual about the change - it was sudden and clear. Within a mile or so, the bluebonnets vanished as if evaporated, the soil turned tan and granular, and squatty trees got squattier with each mile as if reluctant to reach too far from their deep, wet taproots."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 5

Austin, Texas. Photo by Rhea Thomas at uptake.com. Click on photo to go to host site.

Austin, Texas

Every so often, my wife and I would leave San Antonio in the early evening and head up to Austin.  It was about an hour and a half drive up I-35 to downtown Austin, but usually we would hit some traffic on the outskirts of Austin just before we crossed Town Lake into the downtown.  After leaving the downtown skyline of San Antonio, muted in the fading light, the lights of the buildings of Austin reflecting off of the waters made for an interesting contrast with San Antonio.

Perhaps our goal was to have an evening at one of Austin's many good restaurants.  Perhaps there was an event, like a concert, that we wanted to see.  Sometimes it was the opera that beckoned us.  We had season tickets to the Austin Opera and only missed one - when it was too icy to drive and we had to turn back because, even though we were used to plows and salt and sand trucks in the Midwest, they had few of these in the South and even worse, people did not know how to drive in icy conditions.

Once we went to Austin to see the bats fly out from the Congress Avenue Bridge.  Austin, if I remember correctly, has the largest urban Mexican red-tailed bat population in the United States  They roost under the Congress Avenue Bridge for a certain amount of months each year, and quite a crowd gathers when they fly out in the evenings to look for a meal.  We stood under the bridge, listening to the barely audible squeaks of the bats, and soon, a few flew out, followed by an ever increasing torrent.  They made a cloud over town lake as they flew and swooped chasing down mosquitoes and other insects.

But to us, the jewel of Austin was located in Zilker Park - Barton Springs.  Barton Springs is a spring-fed pool straight from the aquifer below the city.  The water remains at a constant temperature, around 68 degrees.  In the summer, there was no better place to swim.  Well, at least I thought so.  One could always go up to Lake Travis and the beaches there, including a clothing-optional beach called Hippie Hollow.  I never went to any of those places, though.  Barton Springs was just my speed.

One of my best memories, though, was leaving Austin late, usually after the opera.  We'd drive back to San Antonio usually around midnight.  A wonderful public radio show, Blues Before Sunrise, usually came on and went into the wee hours of the morning.  At those moments, after having enjoyed a good time in the capital of Texas, driving through the night down I-35, it was easy to forget that we literally sat perched on the edge of the semi-arid desert just to the west.  West of Austin and San Antonio one could drive for hours before coming to a city of any consequence - it was 10 hours to El Paso, probably 12 or so to Albuquerque.  In between lay a lot of flat scrubland, gradually giving way to Chihuahuan desert to the southwest.  But we raced down the interstate, knowing that at the end lay our home in the Mahncke Park area of San Antonio, and our wonderful white dog waiting for us.  As the blues played, and my wife slept, sometimes it seemed like a slice of heaven.

For your listening and viewing pleasure, a band from Austin that unfortunately will not be touring any more - the Asylum Street Spankers.  Another Austin treasure to be remembered.

If you want to know more about Austin

Austinist (blog)
austinwebpage.com
Austin American-Statesman (newspaper)
Austin Bloggers Metablog
Austin Chronicle (alternative newspaper)
Austin Convention and Visitors Bureau
Austin Daily Photo (blog)
Austin Food Carts
Austin Food Reviews
Austin History Center
Daughters of the Republic of Texas
Slow Food Austin
University of Texas at Austin
Wikipedia: Austin
Wikipedia: History of Austin
Wikitravel: Austin

Next up: Johnson City, Texas

Blue Highways: Dime Box, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapIs Dime Box, Texas the everytown that William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) wants us to consider for the human condition?  Or did he just need a break on a long trip across Texas, stopped here for a time, and decided to fill some pages writing about its inhabitants?  I'm not sure so I speculate below.  You can speculate too, and if you want to see where Dime Box is located, click on the map thumbnail conveniently located to the right.

Book Quote

"Across the Yegua River a sign pointed south to Dime Box. Over broad hills, over the green expansion spreading under cedars and live oaks, on into a valley where I found Dime Box, essentially a three street town. Vegetable gardens and flowerbeds lay to the side, behind, and in front of the houses. Perpendicular to the highway, two streets ran east and west: one of worn brick buildings facing the Southern Pacific tracks, the other a double row of false-front stores and wooden sidewalks. Disregarding a jarring new bank, Dime Box could have been an M-G-M backlot set for a Western.

"'....City people don't think anything important happens in a place like Dime Box. And usually it doesn't, unless you call conflict important. Or love or babies or dying.'"

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 2

Downtown Dime Box, Texas. Photo by "Ms. Vicky" at the blog Mariah's Zepher. Click on photo to go to host site.Dime Box, Texas

Given the amount of text that LHM devotes to Dime Box, Texas, you might think that it is a pretty big place.  Now take a look at the Wikipedia page that I link to below.  Dime Box's entry is all of two sentences.

Now that begs a question.  Why did LHM put so much attention into Dime Box?  He stops in a diner, where nothing is going on except for the occasional small talk of some extremely bored people, and where the most exciting thing that happens occurs when an old woman stands up and farts, causing one guy to make the comment that she doesn't need any more beans.  He then visits the post office and talks to the woman at the counter, and she tells him a little about how the town got its name, its ethnic background, and states her speculation on what "city people" think of small towns like Dime Box.  I quote that above.

He then gets a haircut and devotes another section of the book to the barber who gives him a haircut.  He learns that the barber used to press clothes and gets shown the large pressing machine in the back, long unused.  He sees the tree that is in the process of uprooting the corner of the barber's building.  He declares the haircut the best he has ever gotten.

He then stops in a bar and watches men of Czech and German descent play dominoes.  A man with a Czech accent tells him about his war experience and asks him a philosophical question.  Given a choice of one of three implements that he could use to survive, which would he take - a hoe, a fishing pole and line or a gun.  LHM says he'd take the fishing pole, and the Czech says he'd take the gun.

I'm somewhat stumped about LHM's reasons for giving this much detail to this out of the way stop.  Is he making a point about how slow it can be in small towns?  I'm from a small town, so this isn't news to me, and it probably isn't news to others either, whether they come from small towns or big cities.  Is he pointing out that time has a different meaning in places like Dime Box?  Yes, we move faster and time seems to move more quickly in places where there is a lot more action.  In contrast, a small town in an out of the way corner in Texas may seem like time stands still.  It moves, if one looks carefully.  People age, homes and farms change hands, businesses die and sometimes don't come back.  The town experiences booms and busts and sometimes the busts kill it off.  I suspect this isn't news to most people either.

Or is he making a point that places like Dime Box are still here, and that life happens anywhere, even in such a small place.  The quote from the postal clerk points out that small out-of-the-way places have controversy (she states that Dime Box was embroiled in racial politics over busing like a lot of other places in the 60s and 70s), and that people are born, fall in love, have families and die in places like Dime Box just like any other place.  People get their hair cut, they sit in diners and talk, and they sit in bars and drink and play games.  They work.  They live.

Perhaps that's the point that LHM is trying to make.  We get caught up in our own lives, think of ourselves and perhaps our own joys and problems.  We insulate ourselves in our surroundings.  We live in our cities and towns and forget that in other places, people more alike to us than unlike are dealing with similar problems and facing them in similar ways and coming to similar ways of resolving them.  In that way, the most powerful banker in a penthouse suite in a skyscrapered metropolis is connected to the most humble farmer in the smallest town in the middle of the east corner of nowhere.  The tools that each uses to deal with life are different.  One has access to money and the best technology, and one may just have a pair of hands and a voice.  But the things that life throws at us are the same across the board, and we remember that when we stop in a place like Dime Box and a second generation ethnic Czech war veteran from Dime Box tells a story about connecting with Czechs from Chicago over booze and gambling while fighting a war against a fascist regime bent on world domination.  We are all connected through the similar problems that we face.

At least that's what I think that LHM is getting at.  But I might be completely wrong...and it wouldn't be the first time.

If you want to know more about Dime Box

American Profile Magazine: Dime Box
Mariah's Zepher blog post on Dime Box
Texas State Historical Association: Dime Box
TexasEscapes.com: Dime Box
TexasTripper.com: Dime Box
Wikipedia: Dime Box

Next up: Austin, Texas

Blue Highways: College Station, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe pull into College Station, Texas for the night with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM).  If you've lived in Texas, you know that College Station is Aggieland, and just how big their rivalry with the University of Texas is.  To see where College Station is located, click on the map, and gig 'em, hook 'em, or whatever you feel like doing!

Book Quote

"...on the way to College Station."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 1

Photo located at forbes.com. Click on the photo to go to host site. 

College Station, Texas

This was the first Aggie joke I ever heard:

A pickup truck with two University of Texas students in the cab and two Texas A&M students in the bed of the truck skidded off the road and went into a lake.  The two University of Texas students let the water fill inside the cab, equalizing the pressure, and then opened the doors and swam to safety.  As they reached the surface, people pulled them out and onto shore.  Somebody asked, "what happened to those two Aggies in the back?"  One UT student said responded: "They're still down there.  When we swam by, they were still trying to get the tailgate open."

Okay, so the you get the picture.  Texas A&M is located in College Station, Texas and Aggies are Texas A&M sports teams and students.  It is a pastime in Texas to tell these jokes which highlight just how unintelligent Aggies are purported to be.  Here's another I learned:

Texas A&M had to close the library because a student went to the library and checked out the book.

Wait for it...wait for it...okay, there, you got it!  But there's more...

The library had another tragedy this week.  The student returned the book, and had colored in the pictures.

In Texas, almost every ethnic or stereotype joke can be made into an Aggie joke, which makes such jokes acceptable in public locations.  The funny thing is, most of the jokes I heard about Aggies were told to me by an Aggie.  Sam, who lived downstairs from me while I lived in San Antonio, attended Texas A&M and took perverse pleasure in Aggie jokes - he knew practically all of them.  He was also a Mexican-American from El Paso, and knew practically every Mexican joke ever uttered.  Perhaps it was a way of reducing the power of these jokes by taking ownership of them.  That's my politically correct liberal interpretation.  In reality, I think he just liked them and found them funny.  He certainly didn't match any of these stereotypes - he is one of the quickest and most intelligent people I ever met.  He's an engineer, and a good one, and probably makes more in one year than I do in five.  So, Aggie stereotypes, as usually all stereotypes, don't quite add up.

Here's another I found on the web:

There was a group of Aggie science students that wanted to send a probe to the sun, but some UT students said that was impossible and that the probe would burn up long before reaching the sun.  The Aggies replied that they planned to send the probe at night.

Of course the University of Texas Longhorns got ribbed by Aggies.  Because it is the flagship school of the state of Texas, the students there could be regarded as from the Texas elite.  The stereotype was effete snobbery, leading the UT students to be called "tea sippers" or simply "tea sips."  When an Aggie referred to a University of Texas student or grad, he or she might call the Longhorn a tea sipper with a hand gesture that resembled someone holding a cup of tea.

Other hand signals used, especially around the annual Texas-Texas A&M football game involved making a fist, holding it up with palm sign out and then poking out the pinkie and the forefinger while shouting "hook em' Horns!"  Aggies, on the other hand, stick out their thumb like they are hitchhiking and shout "gig em' Aggies!"

Here's another one:

There was an Aggie that was down on his luck. In order to raise some money he decided to kidnap a kid and hold him for ransom.  He went to the playground, grabbed a kid, took him behind a tree and told him, "I've kidnapped you."  The Aggie wrote a note saying "I've kidnapped your kid. Tomorrow morning, put $10,000 in a paper bag and put it beneath the pecan tree next to the slide on the north side of the city playground. Signed, An Aggie."  The Aggie then pinned the note to the kid's shirt and sent him home to show it to his parents.  The next morning the Aggie checked, and sure enough a paper bag was sitting beneath that pecan tree. The Aggie opened up the bag and found the $10,000 with a note. The note said, "How could one Aggie do this to another Aggie?"

Beyond the fun and games, Texas A&M is a very good school.  The George H.W. Bush Presidential Library is located there.  I'm a political scientist, and a position in the political science department at A&M is considered to be a plum position.  Texas A&M has its own military corps, called the Corps of Cadets, of which 42 percent go into a commission in the U.S. Armed Services, according to Wikipedia.

On the eve of the big football game with the University of Texas, Texas A&M had a tradition called Bonfire.  A huge structure of logs was built and set alight, symbolizing A&M's burning desire to beat Texas.  Tragically, in 1999 the structure collapsed while being built and killed and injured a number of student volunteers working on the building of the structure.  Since then, there has been no official Bonfire, and a Bonfire memorial was created to honor the victims.

I appreciate Texas A&M because some great musicians have gone through College Station and the university.  I will end this post with one that I really like - Robert Earl Keen.  He is so beloved in Texas by Aggies that they follow him around to his concerts.  The story is that he and Lyle Lovett, another Aggie, lived together and played around College Station together before going on to their own musical careers.  The YouTube embedded below does not give any video, but is his song, The Front Porch Song, from a live album he did some years ago.  The story he tells in the middle of the song references College Station and Aggies, and is a good companion to this post.  Enjoy!

If you want to know more about College Station

Bryan-College Station Convention and Visitors Bureau
Bryan and College Station, Texas (blog)
The Eagle (newspaper)
Left of College Station (blog)
Texas A&M University
Wikipedia: College Station

Next up: Dime Box, Texas

Blue Highways: North Zulch, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) passage through North Zulch, Texas occasions my musings on what constitutes our U.S. archeology.  I conclude that it's ghost towns.  We can't claim what the Native cultures left us, and we're a young country.  North Zulch is an artifact that has as much archeological value as anything our United States and its culture has to offer as an archeological treasure.  Click on the map thumbnail to see where North Zulch is located.

Book Quote

"I left and went through North Zulch..."

Blue Highways: Chapter 4, Part 1

Old gas station in North Zulch. Photo by Sam Starkey. Click on photo to go to host site.

North Zulch, Texas

In a past post conceived as I read about LHM's travels through Indiana, I wrote about ghost towns.  These towns, remnants of commerce and lives long past which saw their establishment and high times come and go in the life-cycle of things, litter the landscape, especially in the west.  But what caused these towns to fade from existence?  Sometimes their fates were tied to a specific natural resource, usually a mineral like gold or silver, copper, turquoise or another valuable commodity.  Some were lumber towns that died when the merchantable timber had been tapped out.

But sometimes it was more simple.  Sometimes towns died because technology literally passed them by.  In many cases in the west, that technological marvel was known as the railroad.  The creation of railroads was a function of business.  Railroad companies saw potential in establishing these two thin slivers of rail through various places, but like any business, it took capital to build them places.  Railroads had to acquire right of ways.  When crossing public lands, they had to persuade federal, state and local governments to grant them a right-of-way - a strip of land equal to the railbed on each side of the tracks - upon which they would be given the right to put the tracks down.  This right-of-way was often granted in perpetuity.  When crossing private land, the railroad companies negotiated right-of-way terms with the owners of the land. 

Like any business, railroads would go where it was economically most feasible, not necessarily always the most commonsense places.  Railroad companies wanted to have their rail lines go through populous business centers, but they were less concerned about whether they hit small towns.  If a railroad went through a small town, it could automatically increase the business in that town.  But railroads missed a lot of small towns either by chance or design depending on market economics, and those towns that were missed often withered and died on the prairie, or in the shadow of the valley that was not chosen for the railbed.

But some towns, like North Zulch, came about because a railroad missed the town.  It is the testament to the determination of a people to not let their town die to which North Zulch, Texas owes its existence today.  North Zulch came into existence because the original town of Zulch was bypassed by a railroad.  In 1907 many citizens of Zulch, named for the founder of the town Julius Zulch, moved their homes and businesses two miles north to where the Trinity and Brazos Valley Railroad had laid its tracks.  By doing so North Zulch prospered, as small towns go, especially when a branch of another railroad, the Houston and Texas Central, was surveyed through the region.  In 1931 the town peaked at 1000 residents.  But, like the railroads themselves, the town dwindled, until now today it too spends its quiet waning moments as an unincorporated community along a vanished railroad line.

In a young country like the United States, the remnants of towns like Zulch and North Zulch are our archeological legacy.  We don't sport the ruins of Rome, or the wonders of the ancient monuments of Greece.  We have no great pyramids.  We have no mediaeval walled cities or towns.  We cannot point toward the Caddo Mounds or the ruins of Chaco Canyon or the cliff dwellings of the Southwest as products of our culture, even though they are within the United States.  We have our living cities and towns, which must move beyond their usefulness before they become artifacts of our civilization.  And unfortunately, we'll have long joined the dust before our gleaming buildings and our soaring monuments become archeological discoveries of a future age.

But, we have our ghost towns, sitting silent on prairies, in deserts and in the long evening shadows of valleys that once rang with the shouts of children, the metal-upon-metal ring of industry, the call of livestock, and the rise and swell of voices bartering, buying, selling, commercing, conversing, laughing, loving...living.  We have small places, once larger and more prosperous, reduced like North Zulch to a sleepy remnant of their pasts along a railroad line that once was a conduit of wealth and plenty and a road to those faraway places only read about.  These are our legacy, our artifacts, and the archeological treasures that represent us.

If you want to know more about North Zulch

TexasEscapes.com: North Zulch
Texas State Historical Association: North Zulch
Wikipedia: North Zulch

Next up: College Station, Texas

Blue Highways: Caddo Mounds State Historic Site, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapToday's post is a contemplation of time and space, brought about by William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) own musings as he continues through Texas in Blue Highways.  As he says, Black Elk looked from a great height and understood more than he saw, but LHM says he sees more than he understands.  We all feel like that sometimes.  Click on the thumbnail of the map to see, if not understand, our place in time, space and our own mental geography as we continue our journey.

Book Quote

"The sky turned the color of chimney soot. A massive, squared mound, quite unlike the surrounding hills, rose from a level valley; it had been the central element in a Caddoan Indian village a thousand years ago....

"....The aura of time the mound gave off seemed to mock any comprehension of its change and process - how it had grown from baskets of shoveled soil to the high center of Caddoan affairs to a hilly patch of blackberries. My rambling metaphysics was getting caught in the trap of reducing experience to coherence and meaning, letting the perplexity of things disrupt the joy in their mystery. To insist that diligent thought would bring an understanding of change was to limit life to the comprehensible.

"A raw scorch of lightning - fire from the thunderbird's eye - struck at the black clouds. A long peal. Before the rumble stopped, raindrops bashed the blackberry blossoms, and I ran for Ghost Dancing. Warm and dry, I watched the storm batter the old mound as it worked to wash the hill level again."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 1

A Caddo burial mound at Caddo Mounds State Historic Site near Alto, Texas. Did William Least Heat-Moon contemplate this mound? Photo by Dana Goolsby at http://www.texasescapes.com. Click on photo to go to host site.

Caddo Mounds State Historic Site, Texas

Time is always a mystery to me.  It's a dimension that seems to mock my comprehension of the universe and how I understand it.  We live with time.  Time moves constantly, forward without stopping, and we are all subject to it.

I understand, at least on an intuitive level, space.  I don't exactly know what constitutes space, but I realize that we exist within space.  I spread my arms and realize that I take up space.  I understand that even where I seem solid, I really am a collection of cells and molecules and atoms.  There is space between my constituent building blocks that can be penetrated by particles that are small enough, and so space permeates me.

I understand movement within space.  I remember my basic physics that tells me that an object in motion will stay in motion until it encounters friction from other objects.  I understand that everything moves within space, from the galaxies, stars and worlds to the basic atomic structures that form everything that we know.

But time is incomprehensible to me.  Don't misunderstand, I don't spend a lot of energy worrying about time.  But every once in a while, such as when I'm presented with a musing or some other reason to contemplate time, I still come back to the same questions.  What really is time?  Why does it constantly move forward?  Can anything stop time?  Is there one time, or are there many times moving in parallel?  Once a certain time has come and gone, is it completely over, or does all time exist at once and do we only comprehend our own experience of it?  Why is it that physics seem to indicate that time travel, or something approximating it, is only possible to the future but not to the past?  I understand that there are paradoxes if one were to go back in time, the "if you kill your own grandfather would you cease to exist?" problem.  But why does the past sometimes seem as if we can almost touch it, and the yet the future is always such a mystery?

I often wonder if, in large or small ways, I affect time, or if it is simply a machine set in motion and I am nothing to it.  When I sit down to watch a football game and things start going bad for my team, I wonder if events might have been different had I not watched at all.  In other words, was there a time and event crossroad occasioned by my choice to sit and watch the football game, or did it matter at all?  Do my choices intermingle with others' choices and if so, do some have more influential choices than me that affect future time and events?  Or are future events set and we careen toward them with no chance of altering them even if we knew what they were?

I have stood in historic spots like the Caddo Mounds that, as LHM says above, give off "an aura of time."  I have stood in those spots and felt the past surround me and permeate me.  I have even felt a connection with the past.  A year or so ago, I was standing outside a Norbertine retreat center near Albuquerque, in the desert on the gentle slopes of a mesa near the Rio Grande.  The silence was overwhelming, except when an occasional breeze rustled the native grasses.  Suddenly, I felt a distinct thump.  I'm not sure why there was a thump - maybe I had startled a rabbit and it had thumped a warning or, maybe it was something more metaphysical.  The sound startled me to attention, and I looked around.  There, just about a body length away from me, was a potsherd.  It was the fragment of a pot used by the Indian dwellers of the area in a time long past.  There was no telling how old it was.  It sat there, white with a small section of the pot's design painted and still seemingly vibrant and alive.  I bent down and picked it up and examined it, feeling its texture and marveling at the bit of design.  For a moment, I felt connected to that past.  I wondered if, in that same spot some unknown number of centuries ago, someone using that pot also heard a thump, looked around, and felt my future presence.

If you want a sense of the past and the present colliding, go to Rome.  It is a living museum of the past, and you cannot walk into the Colosseum, with the sounds of Rome's traffic swirling around you, and not be instantly transported back to ancient Rome.  You can almost see, vivid and vibrant in front of you, a newly constructed Colosseum, its benches filled with spectators watching a fight between a tiger and a prisoner, or a mock sea battle being staged on the flooded arena floor.  At a gladiatorial contest, might a Roman patron suddenly sense the presence of an Ohio tourist in our present day standing beside him at the entrance to the arena, both observing what they can see and imagine, just for a moment before the feeling vanishes and the patron hurries to his seat to see the next battle and the tourist hurries to catch his wife who is already moving toward the Forum?

I think much more about time now that I am in my middle age.  I wonder when my life will end and time will stop for me.  I think of civilizations that have come and gone and will rise and fall.  I wonder if time will eventually run down and stop, like a slowing watch that needs to be wound.  Does the eventual end of the universe, whether that constitutes a big collapse or instead, the speeding of matter into a dispersed nothingness, mean that time itself will finally meet its end?  I sit and wonder, and in that moment of wonder I am connected through time and space with all that was, is and will be.  I am connected with all of those before and after me who have sat and will sit in wonder and contemplate the same mystery.

Then, like LHM, I go and resume my own journey through time and space as I comprehend them.

If you want to know more about Caddo Mounds

Texas Escapes: Caddo Mounds
Texas Historical Commission: Caddo Mounds
Texas State Historical Association: Caddoan Mounds
Where in the Hell Am I blog: Caddo Mounds
Wikipedia: Caddoan Mounds State Historic Site

Next up:  North Zulch, Texas