Sunday, February 16, 2014 - San Antonio Missions, the Horrors of Houston and Aunt Minnie

Clothes washed, Bloodroot selects a white shirt and tan shorts for today’s adventures.  Keith calls him a Boy Scout, feeling the old scouting uniform best describes Bloodroot’s attire.

Our first stop today, the San Antonio Missions, consists of five separate missions spread around town.  (The Alamo Mission, yesterday’s destination, is one of the San Antonio missions.)  We choose to visit the San José Mission.  Exiting Pearl, Bloodroot, in his Boy Scout regalia, complains of cold.  Keith begins jumping around, gyrating as one stricken with St Vitus’ Dance, shouting like a small child, “Oooh, I’m cold!  I’m cold!” I can hear the unspoken, “Man up, boy!”  I simply watch, amused by the spectacle.

The Spanish built five missions along the San Antonio River, intending to create an indigenous medieval peasant society, loyal to Spain, of course.  The park service has restored the San José Mission.  In the early 1700s, gathering-hunting Indians, harassed by the Apache and drought, voluntarily sought sanctuary in the mission.  The price - conversion to Catholicism, loss of traditional lifestyles, and labor as yeomen farmers.  The choices were hard yet acceptable.  Unfortunately, most of the new converts died of disease.

The mission itself consists of a large walled compound.  We enjoy the stonework.  Inside we find workshops, chapels and living spaces for both the Indians and the Spaniards.  Gravity-fed irrigation systems watered the fields.  Initially successful, the missions began to fade around 1780, undermined by disease and lack of military support.  The missions finally closed their doors in the early 1800s.

We leave the mission heading for Houston and Aunt Minnie.

Bear guides Pearl up I-10 from San Antonio to Houston, four lanes all the way.  I curse this stupid state’s obligatory transit on lousy freeways.  As consumers loyal to big oil, we spend hours on the road, consuming lots of petrol while stuck in traffic on a Sunday.  We ride forever, enmeshed in major congestion all the way between the two cities, observing stranger behavior than we find in Denver, where we have the legitimate excuses of thin air and legal marijuana.  We’re accustomed to aggressive, clueless behavior.  Back home we watch people randomly changing lanes, or crossing five lanes of road to turn only a block later.   On this freeway, totally self-absorbed slow drivers block the left lane, meandering along, because naturally, no one else counts but them.  Mad hornets dash about determined to get around the slowpokes, providing some frightening entertainment.  Our tough trip, full of complete stops, makes me appreciate living in Colorado.  And Houston, East Texas in general, has the population to support mass transit!  We see no public transit, no light rail, no subway – just an interminable stream of vehicles.

For our edification and distraction, we listen to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.  Russell describes Plato’s Republic as a combination of Brave New World and Sparta.  Logically separated into three classes, governed by philosopher kings, everyone works tirelessly for the common good, eliminating poverty.  Russell’s audiobook could accompany you through four or five cross-country trips; I don’t think that you’d hear it all even then!  I doubt that we’ll ever get beyond Greece.

As we travel from west Texas to the east, I find myself liking the state less and less, my distaste rising with the humidity.  Houston smells like Florida, wet and moldy.  Have I become such an habitué of the high plain desert that I feel uncomfortable in the lowlands?  Already I thoroughly miss the thin arid air and find myself choking and gasping from the humidity, as though trying to breathe through a bowl of chicken soup. 

As we near the city, Keith calls Aunt Minnie, asking her what restaurant we could treat her to.  She suggests Dead Lobster.  “No!” we cry in panic.  Keith calls Minnie’s son Vic.  Since we’re near the Gulf, we hope for good seafood.  Vic suggests the Aquarium at Kemah.  Keith forgets to specify quiet and small.

We pick up Aunt Minnie at her apartment.  Six years ago, Minnie visited us in Denver.  What a difference a few years can make!  She’s gone downhill a good bit since then.  Me too.  In 2008, I walked and worked fulltime.  Minnie doesn’t look good.  Her hair askew, she’s missed her facial features when applying make-up.  Encumbered by cheap flip-flops, she walks unsteadily to the car.  She’s doused herself in cheap, foul-smelling, headache-inducing perfume attempting to cover her self-perceived sin of smoking. 

We find Kemah, which turns out to be an amusement park, loud, overpriced and definitely not for us.  We eat at the Aquarium Restaurant, an extension of the amusement park.  In search of a table, we pass numerous fish tanks and brightly painted concrete molded ceilings.  I fear yet another expensive, lousy meal.  The host shows us to our table.  We order.  Minnie happily eats shrimp.  I enjoy my snapper, ignoring the price.  The Bunny orders tilapia in pineapple salsa, which he later announces tastes like someone poured corn syrup over a piece of fish.  Keith also expresses disgust with his meal.  But Minnie dreams a heavenly shrimp-filled dream.  For $160, we have been taken yet again.

Over dinner, Minnie tells us that she’s dropped out of her church, her sole social support, because the Lutherans marry gays and Leviticus 18 calls homosexuality an abomination. I respond that Leviticus 11[1] calls eating shrimp an abomination.  My comment elicits a blank deer-in-headlights stare.  Ah Minnie, the central point of Christianity is love.  How can you not see that?  When asked the greatest commandment, Jesus reportedly said (as documented in Mark 12, Matthew 22 and Luke 10), “The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”[2]

Loneliness rolls off Minnie like a miasma, a palpable sadness you can see and touch.  I so pity her.  She was very good to Keith when he was young.

We drop Minnie off at her apartment.  Exiting Pearl, she again complains of lonesomeness.  Our visit has brightened her world, temporarily diffusing the melancholy which rebounds tackling her as we leave.  We promise to return tomorrow to take her to the pharmacy.

On our way to our very tiny Airbnb flat, we encounter yet more traffic at 8PM on a Sunday.  As Sven enters the flat, I’m stopped dead in my tracks by yet more overpowering cologne reek.  Oblivious to any safety concerns, we fling all the windows and doors wide open.  Bloodroot begins a seek-and-destroy mission, using his nose to save his mother.  Finally, he finds the odor’s source, a plug-in room stench machine.  He unplugs the machine, setting it outside in the grass to perform an appropriate function, like annihilating mosquitos or other unpleasant arthropods.  Mission accomplished, the boys dispel any remaining stink by creating tomorrow’s lunch, a tempeh stir-fry.  We settle in for our well-deserved sleep.

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[1] Bible, King James Version, Leviticus 11:12:  “Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.”

[2] Bible, King James Version, Mark 12:28-31.

Saturday, February 15, 2014 – The San Antonio Riverwalk and the Alamo Mission

This morning I enjoy the most delicious shower.  The world improves, becoming clean and sparkly, even in Del Rio, Texas.  After showering, I can now look at last night’s dinner as a cultural experience, having recovered from being just tired and pissed.  I haven’t had such bad service since… since… well, never.  I still wonder whether the Ramada passes for high class here.  “No, not at all,” says Bloodroot, still disgusted, “even for Del Rio, Texas.”

Heading out again on Texas route 90, we’re almost immediately stopped by the Border Patrol, probably south Texas’ only remaining federal employer.  After ascertaining our citizenship, they send us on our way.

Any time I think that we may be a normal family, Bloodroot will begin to kiss Keith’s bald head in a manner Keith calls a Goat Molestation.  Keith remains stoic, enduring the nearly daily attention, generally shouting, “Goat! Goat!” 

This morning, Keith, not Bloodroot, supplies our daily dose of insanity. Bloodroot wants to backtrack five miles up to the Amistad National Recreation Area to stamp our passports.  We don’t plan to visit the park, only stamp our passports.  This makes perfect sense to me. 

The five-mile backtrack greatly upsets Keith who firmly believes exclusively in forward motion.  “Ten miles out of the way!” shouts Keith as he grudgingly acquiesces.  “I wanna stamp!  I wanna stamp!  It’s only fifty miles back!  Waaaa!” Keith yells, banging his fists against the steering wheel and stomping his feet in a temper tantrum imitation that would bring great pride to any four-year-old.   Pearl jerks as Keith’s feet leave the gas pedal to trample the floor.

Pearl has been talking to Keith again, claiming that she wants to join the 100 mph club.  Keith maintains that she isn’t old enough yet.  I chime in that it’s a bad idea to even look like you might be thinking about breaking a law in Texas.  After all, we have Colorado license plates and the Border Patrol has already stopped us twice.

We buy gas again, still recovering from our brush with death in the Guadalupe Mountains.  Somehow one of Bloodroot’s socks falls out of the car.  Leaving the station, we spot the sock and circle back to retrieve it.  Bloodroot is nothing if not cheap (he prefers the term “frugal”) and we can’t be lolling about throwing out socks!

As we enter San Antonio, I’m assigned navigation, but my hands don’t work.  I fumble through our map collection, never finding the small insert showing downtown and the Alamo, our destination.  Try as hard as I may, I just can’t manipulate the paper, eventually ending up surrounded by piles of misfolded maps.  Keith disgustedly delegates my task to Bloodroot.

Bloodroot leads us as we randomly drive around San Antonio, all the while loudly proclaiming that he knows our exact location and that I lack faith in him.  “We’re going south, Mom.” But Pearl’s compass says east.  The boys consult the maps.  I remain quiet, never an easy task for me.  Bloodroot does indeed find downtown.  We become one with a massive traffic jam directly in front of the Alamo. 

Escaping the traffic jam, we search for parking.  Following a good bit of circling, we discover a city-owned parking lot near the main plaza where Pearl can extend her ramp.  We find the $9 charge a bit steep, but whatever, we’re on vacation.

Crossing the main plaza, we see the imposing Cathedral of San Fernando, a massive Spanish edifice.  San Antonio is Spanish in the same way that Quebec City is French.  As outposts of long-ago European civilization, each strove to maintain the ties to the old country, making them more Spanish than Spain or more French than France. 

This church looks like something straight out of Spain: two large bell towers covered by wooden shutters and three front doors.  The doors, also wooden, no longer completely reach the marble lintels, but I doubt that it’s ever very cold here.  The cathedral transports me back to medieval Spain.  I begin furtively looking over my shoulder for the Inquisition.  Will the Inquisition know my secret thoughts?  Will I pass or am I an obvious Unitarian?  Oh no, I’m an Anglophone! 

We pass enough to enter the cathedral through the side door, buzzing up the ramp thoughtfully provided for Sven.  Settlers from the Canary Islands, of all places, built the church in the mid-1700s, staking their claim in the new world.  They wanted to create an edifice grand enough to house their most prized possession - a baptismal font given to them by the Spanish king Charles III.  The church also contains a black Jesus and a black Mary, who actually look more Indian than black, albeit dark skinned.  The parish unfortunately retrofitted the remainder of the church, effectively erasing our Spanish past.

Crossing the plaza, we find a ramp to the San Antonio Riverwalk.  We descend and walk along the river.   The river resembles a wide canal.  Our stroll takes us past multi-hued buildings, varied architecture, palm trees, greenery, hotels and restaurants.  We even see an arched bridge, a la Venice.  I notice little, finding myself preoccupied with not driving Sven into the river.  Bear wishes that we had allotted more time to San Antonio and vows to return.  We resurface via some secret hotel lift and head to the Alamo.

Ah, the Alamo.  Peter Rowan’s song Moonlight Midnight swirls round my head.  “I will meet you at the Alamo Mission.  We will say our prayers.  Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mother will heal us as we kneel there.”   I spent years playing that song with the Akron (OH) hippies, never tiring of it.  Ah, the irony, now here I am crippled at the Alamo Mission.  I call Dave the bandleader and tell his answering machine that I am indeed at the Alamo Mission.[1]  Although I dutifully say my prayers, I am not healed.

The Daughters of the Republic of Texas maintain the Alamo, a revered shrine dedicated to lives lost in the 1836 Alamo battle.  The Spanish built the Alamo Mission, a far-flung outpost of their extensive empire, to withstand an Indian assault, not the artillery of an 18^th-century army.  Following a thirteen-day siege, the Mexican general Santa Anna’s army overran the mission and brutally slaughtered all combatants, leaving some servants alive to spread the tale of horror.  The Texans, their mettle strengthened by the knowledge of no quarter given (no surrender, all will be slain) rose and later defeated Santa Anna’s army, establishing the short-lived (ten years) Republic of Texas.[2]  The Alamo Mission itself consists of numerous buildings including a church, hospital and barracks.

We take photos of ourselves in front of the mission, then join a Disney-esque line dotted with posters hanging every few feet explaining the Alamo’s history.  My eyes don’t work well anymore, making me a slow reader, certainly something I never thought I’d be.  The darn line moves more rapidly than I can read the placards, forcing me to resort to the internet to satisfy my history jones!   The unimpressive shrine consists mostly of flags and tourists milling about a rectangular building. 

Another secret elevator returns us to the Riverwalk.  Overly hungry, Bear and I can’t decide where to eat.  We don’t want any more horrid tourist crap food, the Del Rio Ramada still weighing heavily upon our minds and bodies.  Fortunately, the Goat assumes leadership of our enterprise, choosing a restaurant called the Acenar.  Through the magic of elevators, we visit the downstairs baño and the upstairs dining room.  The staff forbids us an outside table, claiming prior reservations.  We sit, half of our table outside and half inside, gazing over twenty empty tables to the river below. 

We enjoy our meal despite receiving way, way too much food.  I’m so tired of stupid obscenely large American portions.  We see so many amazingly huge people on the Riverwalk that perhaps we should forgive the staff for the gigantic lunch.  Gotta feed those big Texas boys!  As he rolls up yet another bean and rice burrito, Bloodroot confesses to having inherited his DNA dad’s penchant for eating any swill set before him.  We leave, rescuing Bloodroot from obesity.

Returning to Pearl, we discover that city parking is free on Saturdays.  We drive out to tonight’s Airbnb house.  I can drive Sven through the front door.  Yeah!  And miracle of miracles, we find an operating washing machine and dryer.  We watch TV, drink some wine, and wash clothes.  The exertion of travel disappears with the promise of clean clothing.

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[1] I haven’t spoken with Dave in years, but he still has the same land line he had in 1984.  As an old person, I recall the number from a time when we had to actually memorize phone numbers. 

[2] Texas joined the US during the Spanish-American war in 1846.

Friday, February 14, 2014 - Valentine’s Day – From the Heights of Big Bend National Park to the Abyss of Del Rio, Texas

We arise, settle our bill at the hotel and head back into the park, stopping at a small store for ice and eggs.  A complete stranger hands me a rose for Valentine’s Day.

Pearl climbs the Chisos Mountains once more.  I drop the boys off for the Lost Mine Trail hike and drive over to the visitor center.  Pearl and I argue.  Pearl claims that she isn’t the size of a small piano truck.  She considers herself dainty, cute and feminine, especially in her hat.  Tiring of the argument, I park.  Sven and I exit via Pearl’s ramp.

Sven and I again motor out to the terminus of the Window Ledge trail.  I sit on the park bench and write, this time with a glass of tea in hand.  Once again, I luxuriate in beauty, listening to birdsong, feeling so calm and content.  Could life be better?

At the appointed time, I return to Pearl. Sven and I enter the car; I transfer to the driver’s seat, pushing the button to retract the ramp.  The passenger door won’t close. Finding some invisible mote of dust, the door springs open repeatedly.  A passerby, another complete stranger, shuts Pearl’s door for me.   My best friend forever Lahoma, seriously ill long ago said, “You expect rudeness from strangers as your illness marks you as obviously physically other.  It’s the kindnesses that make you cry.” As always, she was correct. 

I retrieve the boys from their hike.  They bound into the car telling tales of wonder and enchantment.  They’ve seen piñon pines, oaks, junipers, grasses and old stone CCC works.  Climbing up the trail, they gaze over the rock turrets of Casa Grande and eroded remains of long extinct volcanoes.  They once again see the scary, spiny dormant stick Ocotillos but now knowing their secrets, can approach them fearlessly.  Topping a hill, the boys look into the Chihuahuan Desert.  The boys finally ascend lost mine peak at 7600 feet.  “We climbed all over the rocks, Beaver – seeing the vista below from multiple angles.  We ventured out as far as we dared, not wanting to fall to our deaths below.”

An old local legend tells of Spanish explorers finding silver veins in the peak, enslaving the local Indians to work a mine like a mini-Potosi, I suppose.  The workers revolted, slew the Spaniards and sealed the mine entrance to eliminate the potential of further exploitation.  No trace of any mine remains, aside from the cool story.

Leaving Chisos, we stop and cook our lunch of pork chops and kale, grateful for the roofed picnic tables erected by the park.  Even in February, the desert teaches appreciation of shade.

Following lunch, we reluctantly drive north across the desert floor, exiting the park.  We pass through a seemingly endless dry bowl surrounded by hills rising on the periphery.  At long last, Pearl finds a crack in the bowl leading into the south Texas desert. Heading north on 385, widely spaced scrub and prickly pear await us as we enter yet another bowl.

Turning east onto route 90 we travel through a land of vast dry mesas.  At first we see gigantic cattle ranches.  Gradually the fences disappear as the land becomes too dry for cattle.  Is driving across Texas a rite of passage?  The land begins to roll as the mesas recede into the south.

The miles tick by ever so slowly.  We crawl across the landscape, tired, smelly, hungry and sorely in need of a washing machine.  We can’t count the miles via mile markers, because Texas, the cheapest state in the union, refuses to erect them.

At long last, we arrive at the Ramada Inn in Del Rio, Texas.  I hit the traveler’s wall.  Why is travelling through the center of our country so endless and difficult?  For years, I’ve been greatly offended by the snooty New York term “fly over country,” since of course I’ve always lived in the “fly over country,” but now I get it.  I get it.

Somehow, Del Rio, Texas aside, we expect a decent place for dinner, but find nothing exceeding Yuckdonald’s.  Being pretty spaced out, we decide to eat dinner at the hotel restaurant, despite visions of John Waters’ Holiday Inn hell with a really bad band loudly playing Tony Orlando and Dawn songs.

With some trepidation, we join the line for the hotel restaurant.  We watch the restaurant fill with two hundred amorous Hispanics out for a Valentine’s Day event.  At long last, we’re shown to one of six empty tables.  The restaurant brings to mind the Sons of Norway Lodge in Eagle Grove, Iowa.  The hotel may have imported the same old rickety chairs and tables.  Tonight, the staff covers the tables with white tablecloths for the holiday.  I picture the Iowa Norwegians doing this too for important events – my family reunion not being one of them.

After a good wait, our server greets us.  “Hello,” we respond, “What kind of wine do you offer?” “I don’t know.  I’ll have to ask at the bar.”   She disappears.  Around ten minutes later, she returns with an answer.  “Chardonnay and Zinfandel,” she reports.  Keith orders a Chardonnay for me.  I glare at him.  My stolen, outdated motto is “ABC – anything but Chardonnay.” “Dear Beaver,” begins my ever patient husband, “the wine here is much too cheap to be oaky.  You’ll prefer the cheap Chardonnay to the cheap Zinfandel.”  He’s right.

Tonight, as a special for Valentine’s Day, cue Guy Lombardo or Lawrence Welk to strike up some schmaltzy music, the restaurant offers a five-course meal.  Did we want that?  “Sure,” we respond, doubting the existence of other options.  “Great!” she replies, “Get your first three courses at the salad bar over in the corner.” She leaves.  Keith dutifully trots over to what may be a salad bar, noting it lacks food.  Perhaps it was a salad bar in a previous life.  Another worker tells him to sit down, stating, “Your waitress will bring your food.”

In another ten minutes or so, our waitress again returns to our table.  We share our insights on the salad bar.  “Oh,” she says and confesses that she works in the bar but she didn’t know what kind of wine they sold.  Dutifully, she takes our order for the first three courses and wanders off to the kitchen to get our soup, the first course.  Ten minutes later she returns to tell us that they’re out of cream of broccoli, would I care for the other soup?  “NO,” I heatedly respond, now having a glass of wine in me and still no bloody food, not even a fucking cracker.

She scurries off, returning with our salads sans dressing.  She sees the dressings, then asks another worker which one is Caesar.  “Hell if I know, I work at the front desk.” Bloodroot rescues her, helping her choose a dressing. 

Famished, I pour the dressing on my Caesar salad, discovering not Caesar salad dressing but genuine Sysco Truck sweet and sour dressing.  I’m so hungry I eat the unpalatable mess in front of me anyway.

Here comes course three, some sort of burnt offering that may at one time have been a piece of shrimp.  Even the boys can’t eat this.  I order more wine.

The wine and the main courses finally arrive.  Mine consists of heavily salted beef and vegetables.  “The baked potatoes will be out soon,” we hear, but no longer believe anything this woman says.  Bloodroot eats my beef; I eat the vegetables.

We order our three desserts – two for Bloodroot and one for Keith.  I fight boredom as they eat.  During the dessert course, our baked potatoes arrive complete with some margarine on the side.  We toss the margarine, boxing up the potatoes for breakfast.

NO WONDER WE COOK!!!!!

Musing in the bar after dinner, consuming our free drink tickets, I think about our waitress.  Now working the bar, she looks our way and flees, scuttling away like some small rodent.  As a cripple, I don’t generally, well ok, never, incite fear in people.  Pity and disgust, but not terror.  I ponder, wondering.  How do people this stupid manage to walk around all day and not set themselves on fire?  Where is social Darwinism when you need it?  At long last, with enough alcohol and quasi-food, pity overcomes my anger. 

Thursday, February 13, 2014 - Big Bend National Park & the Real Texas

Today we’re up early and out the door, heading east to the park before breakfast but long after sunrise.  As it is February, perhaps I should say relatively early.  We stop to buy gas, our entire lives now revolving around satisfying Pearl’s seemingly unquenchable thirst and our lingering fear of empty gas tanks.  Checking the park map in the gas station, we note the nearest picnic table location with some chagrin.  We buy some tea and settle in for a long haul.

Driving into the park, we stamp our passports at the Panther Junction Visitor Center.   Outside the center, the park has planted a garden of flowers that grow in the desert.  We see creosote bush, acacia, prickly pear, agave, and various cacti.  As we walk through the garden, I see numerous six foot tall completely dead spiny, spiky sticks.  Why has the Park Service left such frightful looking things amidst this pretty garden?  Have they resorted to passive-aggressive crowd control methods to keep the tourists at bay?  Ah no, we’ve found the magical Ocotillo plant that grows leaves and big red blossoms within 48 hours of rainfall.  Without rain, we see only the scary stick.

Returning to Pearl, we stop at the first picnic spot we find.  The gods of camping smile upon us, although I can’t camp anymore.  In this very arid park, we’ve found a table sitting in a lovely copse of medium sized willow trees.  The tree leaves dapple the sunlight, shading us, important here even in February.

Bloodroot carefully retrieves our stove and from Pearl’s hat.  At $160, the cost of our new Primus Firehole far exceeds the price of any camping stove we’ve ever owned or even contemplated owning.  I recall buying tents and sleeping bags for less.  Remember those old Coleman stoves we all had?  And all of the craziness we’d employ creating windscreens for them?  “OK, Keith, stand over there.  Bloodroot – you to the right of him.  Hold your tent bags. Up!  To the left now!  Block the wind!”   With recessed burners deep inside the box, our high tech stove lights and heats in full wind. 

Camping-the new high tech. But shouldn’t young people have to use the old Coleman stoves?  Just to toughen them up a bit?  Just think, early one morning, we magically replace all smart phones with Coleman stoves.  I can hear Bloodroot already, ”Hey, what’s the story with the Wi-Fi on this big green screen?” Would mass starvation ensue?  Would we create an apocalypse? Or maybe just the plot line for an installment of The Hunger Games where the old people are the good guys?

Keith and Bloodroot prepare a great breakfast of bacon and eggs.  As a mother, I proudly reflect that Bloodroot wouldn’t starve even if a Coleman camping stove replaced his i-phone, although he may subsist on nothing but bacon for the remainder of his life.  I’m not sure that bacon and eggs have ever tasted so good! 

During breakfast, we hear a creaking noise.  We wander off to explore.  Not far from our copse we discover an old windmill, one of those ancient rusty contraptions forever associated in my mind with the depression and dust bowl.  Nearly a hundred years old, the windmill still pumps a bit of water out onto the land, greening the area surrounding the picnic table.  The water spurts out rhythmically as the pump gears clack and turn.

Dugout Wells, green and shaded, sits amongst the remains of 1920s farms.  Exuberant farmers once irrigated the Rio Grande’s floodplain growing cotton until the depression took all.

After our refreshing breakfast, we pack up and head down to the river where the boys plan to hike the Boquillas Canyon trail.  We meet two park employees with a backhoe digging something or another.  Keith immediately notices the woman’s fine, powerful and costly Zeiss binoculars.  An unfailingly polite bear, I’ve never previously seen Keith stare at a woman’s chest.  I see the gears turning in his head as he considers leaving me for her.  “I’m taking a bird census,” she states, interrupting his ruminations.

We discuss birds found in Big Bend National Park.  She directs us to a path near a boat ramp where Sven and I can drive right next to the water.  We follow her directions and look out over the river flowing by, wide and lazy, enjoying the spring sunshine with us.

Down by the river, Keith and Bloodroot begin a sword fight with bamboo-like rushes.  Bloodroot towers over Keith but always loses these competitions despite his far greater reach.  Keith chases Bloodroot bonking him on the head repeatedly.  Bloodroot lacked a father growing up and never learned these games, nor does he ever tire of them.

The boys take off on the Boquillas Canyon hike.  Their trail climbs up and over a hill then descends following the river for a wee bit.  Enterprising Mexicans ride horses across the border and set out twisted wire scorpions on rocks hoping to entice the tourists.  The Mexican merchants leave notes in English beside the mini-sculptures assuring us that sale proceeds fund schooling for their kids across the border.   Whether true or not, what a tug on the heartstrings!  The US Park service has given us detailed lectures about NOT buying anything from these entrepreneurs. 

We pile back into Pearl and discover the most amazing thing - the Boquillas Border crossing.  The crossing opened in 2013, unmentioned in our pre-2013 guidebooks.  We failed to bring our US passports with us.  Keith doesn’t believe in the post-2001 seriousness of US borders and drives up to the crossing imploring Bloodroot to ask if we can pretty please cross.  Bloodroot complies, although certain that this will be the stupidest question asked the border patrol all day.  Bloodroot returns with the expected answer, “No US passport; No crossing.”  From now on, should we plan to venture within 100 miles of any US border, we’ll put the damn things in the glove compartment.

We drive away, playing Wall of Voodoo’s Mexican Radio full blast, singing along to celebrate at least looking into Mexico.

Eschewing the far eastern side of the park, we return to the park’s center and climb into the Chisos Mountains, the highest in the park.  Up, up, up Pearl ascends, taking the switchbacks with ease.  “See, I’m strong,” she purrs.  We park at the visitor center.

The Chisos Mountains, named for an extinct Indian tribe, are tall enough to attract moisture.  Daily autumn rains bring the moisture which sustains the basin all year.  The park exhibits speak of the area gradually drying over the past ten thousand years, leaving the high mountains cooler, wetter islands.  The bigger trees gradually died out, losing the battle to the more arid climate.

But a park volunteer tells us otherwise.  In the late 1800s, miners and mining companies completely denuded the park taking every tree and scrap of wood they could find for mine supports.  No longer forested, desiccation began.  The forest has never returned.  Chisos now has scrub trees and much more green than the desert floor below, but no forest. 

The boys head out on the Basin Loop Trail while I investigate the park’s sole handicap accessible trail, the Window View Trail.  Sven and I motor out to a bench overlooking the area.  Mountains surround me as I gaze out over the Chisos Basin, the left hand side much greener than the right.  The mountains funnel water into a stream pouring out through a window dropping to the desert far below.  I peer out through the distant opening listening to birdsong while the wind blows around me.  Birds fly everywhere.  I write. 

The boys return from their short hike.  “Not much of a trail, Beaver,” Keith says.  “We saw a couple of valleys.  I think this is a prequel to tomorrow’s Lost Mine Trail hike.” “We ran into some deer and woodpeckers,” Bloodroot chimes in, far less disillusioned.

Pearl glides down the mountain toward the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive again.  Keith abruptly stops her, jumping out to chase and photograph some bird he sees.  I love him so much!  Bloodroot takes the wheel, guiding Pearl through the desert.  He parks alongside the road while we all nap for half an hour.  Waking, we watch the sun set over the mountain range behind us throwing shadows that creep up the range before us.  Darkness descends; the moon rises.  We leave the park.

Back in Terlingua, far too tired to cook, we decide to dine at the bar next to and a part of our hotel.  We assuage our guilt by noting that we did eat both breakfast and lunch in the park. 

The bar/restaurant occupies two floors, the upstairs consisting of both a restaurant and a promising outdoor deck.  Lacking a ramp or an elevator, we can’t go upstairs.  We sit downstairs with the cigarette smoke.  Locals flagrantly ignore a sign proclaiming “Smoking on Deck Only”. 

Downstairs we sit at one of about ten dark tables.  To our left we find an extensive bar.  In front of us we see a cleared area with a microphone, microphone stand, speakers and chair for a singer.   Offering cigarettes at a mere $8 per pack, a cigarette machine stands in the bar’s back corner.  Have we fallen into a time warp? We explain cigarette machines, an embarrassing blast from our past, to Bloodroot.  Very large, very drunken Texans occupy the table next to us, including two assholes smoking.  Frankly, not wishing to be pummeled by their fists, I’m content to let them smoke.  Eventually the drunken smokers leave.  Unfortunately, their stench remains behind.

We’ve entered the real Texas, where folks don’t want the government or anyone telling them what to do, including commonsense things like not smoking.  I order a hamburger and home cut fries, recalling my erstwhile friend Alma’s advice, “Buy what the restaurant excels at.  A salad will suck in a bar.”  Alma knows her restaurants well, being the sole person in her 50s I’ve encountered completely incapable of cooking.  And she’s right.  I enjoy my hamburger while dipping my fries in mayonnaise.  What else could I want?

A local man, guitar in hand, takes the chair and microphone and begins to play.  It’s awful.  The audience begins shouting.  The man stops, adjusts the soundboard and begins again.  He’s really good.  We hear original songs about alien abductions, opera and moving to the zip code 79852, explaining why you’d move here.  “I found myself in the middle of nowhere…”

After the performance the bar clears.  Perhaps people do have day jobs here.  We buy a CD from the singer Alex, learning that his wife sings opera.  No one appears to be from here, but they all moved here, drawn by the idea of living in the middle of nowhere, away from the city, away from mortgages, away from rules, away from lights to a place where you can be yourself, look at the myriad stars and just live.

I’ve found the Texas I’d so feared.  The West Texas of the movies.  The Texas of certain police harassment due to our Colorado license plates.  What did we find?  Kind, loving people.  People feeding Bloodroot because he appears too thin to them.  People interrupting their work day to measure a door to be sure the wheelchair would fit.  Everything I thought was wrong.  Time to examine my own prejudices!

Wednesday, February 12, 2014 - Prada in Big Bend National Park

Yesterday’s near empty tank brought a sleepy headedness to Pearl.  She finds it hard to think without fuel and feared that Bigfoot might munch on her too.  “He may like metal you know,” she admonishes Keith.  “And I am quite attractive, younger and better looking than any of you lot.”   We have a precedent here.  On a prior trip, I recall Bloodroot admiring himself in a spoon proclaiming, “Ah, Beauty.”  Am I to be ever surrounded by this clueless vanity?

We buy gas in Van Horn.  Primed with petrol, Pearl completely recovers from yesterday’s scare.  She heads out down Texas route 90 whistling along, exuding the happiness common amongst all young things.  We cruise through a stark dry country dotted by the Van Horn then Sierra Vieja Mountains to the west.  “Texas?  Mountains?” you ask.  Yes, west Texas boasts numerous mountain chains as the Rockies wind down into Mexico.

We drive through an empty place, encountering perhaps five cars between Van Horn and Marfa.  Yet the desolation creates beauty.  We see roadrunners.  Unlike their cartoon namesakes, they move quite slowly.  Pearl chases the birds off of the road.

Around forty miles north of Marfa we find a Prada store alongside the road in the middle of absolute nowhere.  Another tourist couple stops, snapping photos.   They tell us, “This art was created by a New York artist who tired of Manhattan and wanted to relocate as far from the New York art scene as possible.  He picked Marfa, Texas.”   Fact checking on the internet, I learn that these people were completely full of it.  Two Scandinavian artists working in Berlin created the sculpture as a comment on consumerism. 

Locals immediately vandalized the work, breaking the windows, spray painting the building and stealing all the genuine Prada articles inside.  But this working class rage, this honest response to obscene consumerism doesn't fulfill the artists’ desire.  The artists quickly rebuilt the fake Prada store installing Lexan plexiglass windows, numerous security cameras both outside the building and concealed inside the new bottomless Prada purses.   Prada donated the merchandise twice.

I see the very same anger exploding, inciting the have-nots to attack Prada, one of wealth’s great symbols, also driving the more impoverished Taos locals to spray paint graffiti all over the property of the rich back in Taos.    

The artists themselves want the sculpture to decay into the environment.  They do intend a statement on consumerism.  Their statement isn’t Marxism and class struggle but rather the impermanence of all.  Even the fabulously wealthy will die, fading into dust just as the Prada store will dissolve into the desert.

We drive on to Marfa.  Marfa has become a center for minimalist art but we fail to find any of it.  We drive around the town for a bit, stop at a coffee shop/laundromat duo, obsessively buy more petrol and drive on.  Marfa has revitalized its economy by attracting artists to live and work out here in the middle of the desert.  We see a lot of desperate rural poverty on this trip; it’s good to see a small town doing well.

We arrive at our hotel around 3PM, the only early day we’ve ever had.  Some confusion arises around our reservation.  We finally learn that Bloodroot made the reservation in his name.  As a family of this century, none of us has the same last name.

After check-in, we have three hours of daylight.  “Let’s go!” says Pearl as we head out to Big Bend National Park.  This afternoon we cruise down the Ross Maxwell Scenic Drive taking us past desert vistas and tall mountains devoid of green.

 We stop first at the Tuff Canyon. Bloodroot charges off down the trail into the gulch.  Keith follows him down into the canyon at a bit more leisurely pace.  I drive Sven in circles above them, contenting myself with wildflowers – lupines everywhere.  Scanning the scenery, I begin to think. 

As the eternal student of languages I never master[1], I note that English has two identical words for elevated flat land forms – butte (mound) from the French and mesa (table) from the Spanish.  English, the eternal amoeba, grows by absorbing all other language words, even carefully whispered ones you think that she doesn’t hear. 

My mind wanders back to the Norman Conquest (1066), a time where one would expect the language of the victorious French to replace Old Norse/Germanic English.  Au contraire, English expanded to include the new words brought by the Normans, leaving us Anglophones with two words for most things.  You can come (German kommen) or arrive (French arrive). The French word generally a bit more high-faluting, our language eternally reminds us of who conquered whom all of those years ago.  Bloodroot posits, “Mom, you’re lending credence to my theory that European languages are really all just elaborate hoaxes.” 

The boys return, interrupting my musings. We climb back into Pearl, Bloodroot scurrying to the Castolon Visitor Center to collect the all-important national park stamp.  He then spends ten minutes perfectly parking Pearl, during which time the visitor center closes.  No stamps today.

After shedding a few tears of disappointment for the missing stamps, we venture on out to the Santa Elena Canyon down by the Rio Grande, where we discover an entirely different world.  Limestone cliffs rise 1500 feet above the river.  The river’s water feeds trees and vegetation producing greenery rare for this area.  Across the river, the mesas join together leaving a small passageway, inviting, but unfortunately in Mexico.

 On the Santa Elena Trail, the boys hop across the Terlingua creek and begin walking along the Rio Grande.  They hike up a narrow canyon, watching the river recede as they climb.  Reaching the top of the switchbacks, the boys look north to the Chisos Mountains and south into Mexico, only a few hundred feet away. They walk until dusk descends in the canyon, snapping photos of the moon on their return trip.

 Meanwhile, I motor towards the river for a better look.  Sven quickly raises concerns about the sand, fearing that we will spin ourselves into a hole like Rumpelstiltskin, perhaps emerging in China.    Listening to reason (for once), I return to the picnic table, look out over the river toward the tall cliffs of Mexico, and read my Taos book about Kit Carson.

As the day ends, we drive back out of the park to our hotel in Terlingua, Texas.  When we made our reservations last fall, the hotel staff measured the door to make certain that Sven would fit into the room, calling us back with the results.  Sven would fit.

In reality, the sidewalk and door frame aren’t really wheelchair accessible.  Each time I enter, I take a running start from the parking lot to bump up over the sidewalk curb and the lintel of the door frame.  Sven often gets stuck.  The boys will then provide a power assist for his motor, pushing us into the hotel room.

Our room has no cooking facilities but we do have a picnic table outside on the sidewalk.  We set up our new stove, chop vegetables, and prepare a wonderful steak stir-fry.  The hotel dogs begin circling us warily.  We befriend them by feeding them beef scraps.  They love us. 

After dinner, Bloodroot is still hungry.  He walks over to the hotel’s bar/restaurant seeking ice cream.  A server takes one look at him, sees a starving child needing feeding, and promptly dishes up five scoops of ice cream, which he devours.  We all wish for Bloodroot’s metabolism.  She refuses payment.

---

[1] Not for a lack of interest.  No employer ever considered me cool enough for an overseas job assignment.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014 - Carlsbad Cavern, Bigfoot and Texas

Carlsbad - what a great name, but how did it arise?  I seek Carl’s bath in vain.  Is there a spa here?  Healing waters?  This question draws quite a few blank stares and head shaking from the locals.  Amongst the normates, wheelchairs infer diminished mental capacity.  My question only confirms this prejudice.  Finally, thanks to Wikipedia, I learn that the town and the caverns take their name from a Bohemian town with hot springs visited by a holy roman emperor Charles IV in the 1300s.  I know nothing of Charles the IV save that he once bathed in Bohemia.  Did he improve hygiene in the middle ages, or simply notice the smell surrounding him?  We’ll never know.  HA!  High school German comes in handy once again.

Bad weather all week in Carlsbad, but does it matter?  We’re underground.  Rising early, we arrive at the caverns in time for the 9AM lantern tour.  A snow ice fog shrouds the parking lot.  “Yuck,” says Pearl, settling in for a long nap. 

Carlsbad houses thousands of healthy bats, as yet untouched by the white nose death fungus (white nose syndrome or WNS).  Since 2006, the disease has steadily marched west from New York, leaving millions of bats dead in its wake.  WNS arrived in

Missouri in 2013.  Before allowing us to visit the famous caverns, the park service wants to ascertain that we haven’t visited any eastern caves housing the fungus and dead bats in the past five years.  We haven’t.

While I sit in the cafeteria, sipping hot tea and writing, Bear and Bloodroot depart for the lantern tour.  On their excursion, each student spelunker receives a specially designed wooden lantern to use during the two hour ranger led tour.  Exploring a route not open to the public, the boys learn the history of the cave and hear stories of the cave.  Each person uses his lantern to illuminate the rocky path through the cavern, recreating the experience of the early cave explorers. 

The boys return for lunch.  In the early afternoon, we all descend to the main cavern.  During the summer, the wait for an elevator ride down can stretch out to two hours.  The park service has been building four additional elevators for several years now, as yet incomplete.  We presume that they hired the same moron contractor we hired, Mr. Magoo.  As we travel, we note Mr. Magoo’s fingerprints all over the place.  He sure gets around. His reputation for incompetence, chaos and mayhem must NOT precede him.

We visited Jewel Cave two years ago.  Touring that cave, I descended via elevator, circled a room around size of our kitchen and rode the elevator back up to the surface, having explored the extent of their handicap accessible space.  Thus primed, I don’t expect much from Carlsbad.

I roll into the cavern.  Wow!  The expanse before me shocks me.  Taken aback, after a moment I see that Carlsbad’s accessible trail dwarfs some entire caves I’ve visited.  We explore the Big Room and meet up with Virginia, the NPS ranger who led the boys’ tour this morning.  Virginia walks along with us, providing our own private tour of Carlsbad.  She took this job as a fluke one summer, concerned about working underground.  Her fears evaporated as she found her soul in the cavern; she has never left.

Every night from May to October, thousands of bats burst forth from the cave hunting their evening meal.  Long ago, local ranchers traced the bats to the cave.  Around 1900, a teenager named Jim White began exploring the cavern with his homemade ladder constructed of rope, wire and sticks.  He named the features and rooms near the surface.  The first rooms reveal his fear of his discovery (devils, witches, cauldrons).  Was this the pathway to hell?  Calming down, the later names become more fanciful reflecting the awe the cavern inspires (fairyland, temples of the sun, lion’s tails, brides, etc.)

Unlike most caves developing slowly as rainwater percolates through limestone, much of the Carlsbad system formed when hydrogen sulfite rich ground water mingled with rainwater.  The resultant sulfuric acid dissolved the limestone creating the massive caves while racing (geologically) ever deeper into the earth.  Over the next million years, dripping water dissolved calcium in the remaining limestone decorating the caves with long pointy stalactites (clinging tightly to the ceiling) of myriad different shapes and sizes.  The calcium laden water built stalagmites (you might trip over them) climbing upward from the floor. The water flow determines each feature’s shape. Slowly dripping water forms soda straws and stalactites.  A stalactite and stalagmite grown together become a column.  Rainwater flowing down a slanted ceiling creates curtains.  Calcium collecting around a pebble builds a pearl or popcorn, depending on mineral composition. 

Virginia shows us each sculpture on the trail, fondly naming each.  We see colors in the features.  We close our eyes while she inserts her flashlight in a cuplike feature of a stalagmite she named “the bride”.  Upon command, we open our eyes to a green glow created by her flashlight exciting the calcite molecules in the sculpture.

We also learn that the bat death white nose syndrome originated in Europe.  Curse the eternally ethnocentric American park system!   While we had not visited any eastern North American caves in the past five years, we did visit the Cro-Magnon caves in France.  Performing a quick inventory of my attire, I exhale upon realizing that not one thing I’m currently wearing had been worn in France.  I could still walk then and hadn’t yet met Sven.

Even today, the caves hold many secrets.  Last year, rangers became curious about a dark space above the Big Room.  Carefully anchoring a rope near the ceiling, they laboriously shimmied up the rope to discover another huge set of caverns.  Working in October, they named the new rooms the Halloween rooms in honor of their discovery time.

The ever patient Bloodroot tires of our companionship and decides to take the half hour trail walking out of the cave.  We arrange to meet him by Pearl.  In what seems like a very short time, Bloodroot returns to collect us.  He tells the rangers guarding the cave entrance that he’s lost his parents.  We naturally are still talking with Virginia.

We reluctantly leave the Caverns, stopping to buy some necessary souvenirs.  Keith wakes up Pearl, a bit groggy from the weather.  We drive back out to White City passing the only gas station around for miles.  “Doesn’t look open,” says Keith stepping on the gas, turning south on 180 heading toward Van Horn, Texas.  We pass last night’s hotel, never thinking to ask the employees there about closest gas station.

“Dear, how much gas do we have?” I query a bit later. 

“I don’t know how to read this gauge,” he responds.  I look and point.  Pearl has calculated her remaining gas will take us 52 miles.  We have 137 to go. 

“We’re hosed.”  We don’t have enough gas to return to the city of Carlsbad, 27 miles north of the park, or enough to reach our hotel in Texas.

“Perhaps the next national park will have a gas station near it,” says Keith brightly, ignoring the reality that Carlsbad, a much bigger park, did not.  Silently, I too hope for a gas station by the Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

Pearl ascends into the Guadalupe Mountains as her gas gauge sinks toward oblivion.  Entering a gothic novel, we climb into an ice covered winter world.  The temperature drops.  A white mist descends, covering us, the mountains, the road and Pearl in secrecy and silence.  Bigfoot lurks, camouflaged by the white.  He waits with a hunter’s patience for Pearl to consume our remaining gasoline.  Once we’re truly stranded, lacking both petrol and cell phone coverage, he’ll pounce.  I pray for a quick ending.

Bloodroot spots a sign saying “Guadalupe Mountains National Park.”  We pull into the parking lot, quickly killing the engine.  Bloodroot runs to the visitor center, collecting the all-important national park stamps, making Guadalupe Mountains our first drive by stamping.

I remain in Pearl, delighting in the glorious reality of intact entrails uneaten by Bigfoot.  I check my arms, legs, torso, discovering myself intact, unbitten, unscathed.  I sigh with relief.  Exhausted by our brush with death, I have no desire to visit the ice shrouded park.  I’m sure that I hear Bigfoot, deprived of easy prey, howling outside.

Keith negotiates plaintively with the park personnel.  They reluctantly sell him two gallons of their lawn equipment’s gas for $15, no more, with three gallons we could have made it to the highway (I-10) and civilization.  He learns that the gas station by Carlsbad was open; just unattended.  “Use your credit card to start the pumps.  They’ll dispense gas.”

The park rangers give us directions to the nearest gas station, in Dell City, Texas, forty miles east.  We had been heading due south.  Gliding down out of the mountains, using as little gasoline as possible, we descend into the Texas plains.  As we drop, the snow, ice and haze diminish then disappear.  Bigfoot, the star of our gothic novel, melts into Texas’ endless plains, the plains somehow also gothic in a more cowboy way.  As we drive the hour out of the way, we begin to breathe slightly more freely. Time dilates, crawling along, while I do my best to I think of anything but the gas gauge.  (Time dilation-speed of light-theory of relativity-Einstein…)

At long last, we spot the Dell Oil gas station ahead.  The locals at the station, busy buying gas for their farming equipment, listen as Keith tells the full blown story of our escape from peril and the paucity of gas stations in this part of the country.  He gesticulates, his body displaying his angst.  “We almost ran out of gas!” he concludes.  “Yup, you can’t do that here,” a sweet Texas tinged voice responds.  (And Bear says I talk to rocks!  This woman is quite kind, not at all lithic, but he will also talk to anyone who will listen.)

We buy $60 of gasoline at Dell Oil, drive another hour back to our southbound route followed by another two hours south for good measure to our hotel in Van Horn, Texas.

After our day’s adventures, the boys express unwillingness to cook in the dark.  Not that I blame them.  We head over to the one promising looking restaurant in town, the Hotel El Capitan.  But the HOT is dark in the hotel sign, so it reads EL EL CAPITAN. 

In the 1930s, an El Paso businessman Charles Bassett constructed five similar hotels to serve the north south route tourists between Carlsbad Caverns and Big Bend National Park. 

In the late 1950s, interstate 10 opened running west to east across northern Texas, taking most tourists with it.  The hotel closed to be reborn in the 1970s as a bank.  In 2007, times changed again.   Painstakingly restored, the western style hotel features exposed beams, expansive tile and woodwork, producing the feel of luxury a century past.  The bank vault remains adjacent to the dining room, now stocked with liquor.

We notice more people working in the restaurant than dining there.  Our server, Nina, moved back to Van Horn to care for her ALS afflicted father.  With her care, her father lived an additional 14 years.  I’m impressed; ALS generally kills its victims in five.  Nina, a single parent with two kids, also adopted two more children whose mother had been incarcerated.  All the children have grown up and are doing well with their lives.

I order a pistachio crusted fried steak, not realizing that a fried steak is a glorified hamburger.  Is the food particularly good?  No, but it’s real and different.  I’m in Texas.  I enjoy the food for what it is.

I do so miss the South and Southerners.  I miss complete strangers giving you sincere, heartfelt love and kindness.  People will open their lives up to you, wrap you close in their arms and enclose you in their circle of love.  I miss the politeness in the way we treat each other.  Someone once famously said, “If you can’t appeal to a Southerner’s sense of decency, you can usually appeal to their sense of politeness.” And we touch each other all the time too.  I miss women hitting me shouting “Girl!”  I do NOT miss the obscenely conservative politics intertwined with conservative religion NOR do I miss the heat.

Nina asks us if we’ve seen the reality TV show Duck Dynasty as our travels will take us to Louisiana, the dynasty’s hailing spot.  We express our unfamiliarity with the show.  Nina shares her opinion, “Bunch of rednecks acting trashy.”  “But,” she adds, “They don’t have to work anymore.”

We query Nina about the liquor in the vault.  “There’s nothing in this town to do but drink.  So we thought it best to lock the liquor up.” Ah, Southern practicality.

We find this hotel far more charming than the Taos Inn.  The El El Capitan doesn’t make a pretend past for the tourists; it breathes authenticity of a time long gone from its broken neon sign to the liquor in the vault to the down home Texan menu. 

Nina ladles out encouragement.  “Keep travelling,” she says, giving me a big hug as we part.