#Also there are Czechs in Texas and they are doing very well which proves my point | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

coreymichaelsmithson · 7 years

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A Little Gentleness In Texas

Texas has been exceptionally generous.

For much of the past week, I've been staying with some close friends in Austin. It's been a visit filled with intimate talks, board games, laughter, and peaceful meals. This rest was much needed, as I've been feeling the onset of serious road fatigue, and the spiritual comfort my pals provided was priceless. During my stay, I became deeply attached to one of their dogs, a giant pit bull with a heart of soft butter. Despite his obvious strength, he was extraordinarily gentle … very loving, very eager to please. He had the biggest, blockiest head I've ever seen on a pit; it looked like the kind of skull you might find on a dinosaur. There was something especially satisfying in holding a dog's huge square noggin in my hands, pressing my nose right up to his snout, and letting him slobber all over me. Though I knew in the back of my mind that this animal could kill me in an instant, my trust in him was absolute. We were mutually smitten.

I rode out to see another friend and his lovely family in New Braunfels, a German settlement that sprouted halfway between the capital and San Antonio during the 19th Century. It has a gazebo in the middle of town, the kind that an oompahpah band probably played in during the Nineteen-Oughts, and an old-school bakery selling what locals call "kolaches". They're called "klobásník" among Czech immigrants and "pigs in a blanket" by everybody else. We also toured through the charming downtown of Gruene, which features the oldest dance hall in Texas and a super fancy Victorian bed and breakfast. The town had once fallen on hard times, after a boll weevil infestation destroyed the entire cotton crop in 1925, but in more recent years it's enjoyed a boom among well-to-do tourists, who walk among its restored façades and art-directed rusticity, and eat at its pricey "localvore" restaurants. The cotton gin has been turned into a wine tasting room.

Back in Austin, one of my hosts hired me to help her with an upcoming sculpture project, so I spent that whole Friday morning getting amped up on Doctor Pepper and cutting out complicated shapes with a scroll saw. This proved to be a challenging task, tracing out the anatomical forms she had drawn, and it took me some time to feel comfortable with the vibrating, noisy, slightly terrifying machine … but eventually the job became meditative and fun.

The next day, my friends and I drove a little ways out of town, to a villa in the country, for a family reunion of sorts. Every year, a gang of artists and oddballs, most of them heavily tattooed, pool together some money, load up on provisions, and rent out this country home for a long weekend of swimming, eating, merriment, and relaxing. We popped in for the afternoon, and enjoyed ourselves immensely. What a fantastic group of people.

The owner of this place also owns a vintage clothing store in Austin, and she is famous for her … uh … "eclectic" tastes. I never got to see her clothing store, but her rental joint has to be seen to be believed. The whole house has been découpaged within an inch of its life. No surface is left untouched … every wall is covered by a dense collage of movie posters, license plates, postcards, ceramic suns, bottle caps, masks, tchotchkes. You can stay in the "cowboy" room, or the "outer space" room, or the "cactus" room, or some other nutty themed space. One of the bathrooms was full of horse pictures, while another was dedicated to the Woodstock era. It's outsider art, it's horror vacui, it's totally fucking bonkers. I only spent about thirty minutes in the house itself before the walls started to close in on me.

I went outside, parked myself in a comfortable chair, and struck up a conversation with a local blacksmith. He's been working with hammers … forging them, actually … with an eye to their narrative and symbolic possibilities. We had a fascinating talk about the importance of the hammer. It is, after all, our first tool, the key to our entire technological universe. The hammer is more than just an implement: it is the extension of a gesture, it is the concentration of intent into an action. It transforms latent energy into a physical result. The hammer seems like a simple thing, but it really isn't … everything in our history emerges from this one tool. And once you use a hammer, you can't really go back to how things were before. Sure, you can pry out the nail you drove in, perhaps you can try to smooth out the dent you made, maybe you can put a wig over the bloody gash … but you can't undo the hammer's strike. It is the perfect demonstration of a one-way event in time.

The next day, on a whim, I checked out the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, a hulking Bunshaft monolith on the UT campus, not very far from the tower where Charles Whitman took up his rifle in '66. This was my first time visiting a presidential library, and I wasn't sure what to expect. There were some odd unrelated items in the archive, including Anne Sexton's typewriter and Zelda Fitzgerald's feather fan, but the main attraction was the man himself. Well … him and his Lady Bird, whose modest office also gets the full reconstruction treatment. Over the course of two hours or so, I learned more about our 36th President than I ever really wanted to. After dutifully reading up on his Civil Rights efforts and environmental record, I rounded a corner and met an animatronic figure of LBJ telling jokes. It was definitely on the far side of the uncanny valley: the rubber on his hands was peeling, the corners of his mouth had that weird gummy quality of robots, and the creaks of his cogworks were louder than his punch lines. Nonetheless, I kept pressing the magic button over and over again, like a bored four-year-old.

Afterwards, I went to a park full of peafowl, and watched them strut and roost about the grounds. Peacocks drag their treasures behind them the same way that rich socialites drag their minks across the floor. They are living dinosaurs, and they scream horribly.

Today, I drove over five hundred miles, probably my longest sustained haul yet on this trip, and during this time I realized that Texas had been saving up its most wonderful gift until now. It gave me something I've been denied too frequently during this journey: space. I finally managed to find myself some of the solitude that I've been craving on the road. There were stretches in West Texas where I didn't encounter anoth-r soul for fifty miles or so, and it was absolutely blissful.

Needing a break from driving, I stopped at a dinosaur park and eyeballed fossilized trilobites and several silly dinosaur statues. They were all kind of goofy: the Tyrannosaurus Rex was pudgy and cross-eyed, Allosaurus had big oafish feet, and the Pachycephalosaurus wore a ridiculously worried expression, as if it had just remembered having left the oven on at home. There were some clunky animatronic figures as well, and they made me remember my uncomfortable encounter with Icky Rubber LBJ. I felt somehow that Texas didn't want to scare me too much with the harsh realities of Cretaceous life or Presidential responsibility. Still, I thought about those dinosaurs as I passed dozens of churning oil pumps.

At one point, Pamela seemed to be on the verge of overheating … we had, after all, been hurtling at eighty miles an hour through a sunbaked landscape, easily ninety degrees in the shade … so I pulled over for a while and let her engine cool down. It was a rocky area, full of dry riverbeds and prickly pear, probably the sort of place that rattlesnakes and outlaws favor. The ground was a gorgeous shade of brick, against which the green of the succulents stood out brilliantly. Nobody drove by us for at least an hour. It was just the wind, the sun, the red rock, and the boundless blue sky. The break did us both a world of good, and after a general check of all her fluids we were back on the road, passing through enormous cattle ranches and tiny town squares and endless scrubby plains.

Tonight, fifty miles south of Amarillo, I encountered my first honest-to-goodness supercell thunderstorm on the open road. I parked Pamela by a railroad crossing at sunset, and watched as the last light of the sun lit the updraft in bright dessert colors: French vanilla, flan, orange sorbet. Mammatocumulus (literally, "boob clouds") hung from the underside of the anvil, signaling a highly turbulent atmosphere. Their glow lingered long after the sun had set. I was incredibly lucky in terms of my position in relation to the storm. Another cell in the same line was dropping 3" hail to my south, near Lubbock. I was just far enough away to take in all the glory, while facing none of the hazards. As I was heading northwest, towards the afterglow of the sunset, and skirting the outermost edge of the storm, I was treated to an unforgettable panorama. Ahead of me, the whirling turbines of a wind farm were set against the dusty rose left behind by the retreating sun. Behind me, lightning branched and blazed before a background of deep navy blue. Watching the strikes light up my rearview mirror, I considered my good fortune. Just like the big-headed, big-hearted pit bull, who let me plant kiss after kiss on his forehead, Texas was taking it easy on me.

***

The next time Pamela overheats, we may not be so lucky. If you are enjoying my writing, and want to travel even further with me, please consider throwing a few bucks towards the “oh crap, the check engine light just came on” fund. As always, thank you for your support and encouragement!

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