“Don’t go there.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Aren’t you afraid you’ll be killed?”
I am pleased to report that we made it through Texas alive and well.
Our plans to travel through Mexico, Central and South America elicited a wide variety of responses. Our plan to stop for a while in Texas seemed to make many of our friends anxious for us to reach the relative safety of El Salvador. Honestly, we didn’t really know much about Texas before going, aside from what reaches us in the news, which is rarely positive. What we found was a humbling sense of hospitality and generosity and yes, some fear and trepidation concerning our North American neighbors to the south of the border.
We had planned a stop in Lakehills, Texas, where my sister Anna and her boyfriend Greg live, to make modifications to Taiga, our car, and to take care of a few other paperwork-type things to get ready for our trip abroad. And so we drove from New Orleans to Lakehills, in the heart of the Texas hill country.
The hill country covers an area to the north and west of San Antonio in a green meringue of hilltops and ravines. We arrived during a break in the state’s historic drought. Expecting dry weather and heat, we found instead, violent rainstorms and mild temperatures. For the most part, the rain restricted itself to the evenings and nights, allowing us to work on the car during the daytimes.
Greg, as I have mentioned in a past post, is an extremely handy guy and we’re deeply indebted to him for all his help with the modifications. He was able to work some time into his schedule to guide us through the steps involved in realizing our vision for our car. Besides working on the car, we also spent time with family, many of whom had come down for a last get-together before we said farewell to the USA for a while.
The animals
“Wait, wait; what am I hearing right now?”
While talking on the phone, Jordan and her boss simultaneously discovered that roosters do not just crow at dawn. In fact, they crow all day long, for as long as they feel like it. Stranger yet was the sounds that the hens made; a long, loud throaty warble, rather like a strangled and overly theatrical dying scream. What her boss pictured when he heard these sounds, I can only imagine.
“Strangled” seemed to be a common theme among animal sounds on the ranch. Nights were full of frog “song”, which sounded like an attempt to copy the hens. Most ridiculous by far were the goats. Being fed only once a day, they took to crazed bleating the moment they saw someone awake in the mornings. This bleating not only sounded like a desperate strangled scream, but was accompanied by what I can only assume is the goats’ ‘hungry face’, the human equivalent of which is to stick one’s tongue out and grimace until the tendons of the neck stand out while bugging one’s eyes out as far as possible. While screaming. I try not to laugh at the discomfort of others, but seeing the goats do this the first time, especially without knowing to expect it, caused me to laugh right in their faces. If their understanding of human emotions is as developed as mine is of theirs, then maybe they just thought that I was hungry, too.
Of all the animals we saw in Texas, we least expected the camels. But there they were, grazing on a ranch along the side of the road that connects Lakehills and Bandera. It turns out that camels have a long history in Bandera County. Although the ones that we saw were somewhat recent, bought for a short-lived camel racing venture, the US Army once tried raising camels for a similarly short-lived foray into developing a camel-mounted cavalry unit during the late 19th century.
Besides camels and ranch animals, the hill country teemed with wildlife. Frogs and toads populated the banks of the Medina River and hid under the rocks scattered throughout the ranch. The century plants adorning many gardens and public spaces provided refuge for green anoles, a small lizard that looks a bit like an iguana, but can change colors like a chameleon. Birds were everywhere. The most exotic for me were the muscovy ducks, which I had never seen before. By far, the most plentiful wildlife we saw were the insects. The hills seemed densely populated with black widows, red-headed centipedes, tomato and tobacco hornworms (actually types of caterpillars), all manner of beetles and bugs. As someone who is almost compulsively fascinated by wildlife, I felt quite content to be there.
Airborne Bike Repair
We lost a gear from one of our bikes, while removing the wheels to pack it into the U-Haul in Brooklyn. We were going to leave the bikes with Anna and Greg, for them and other friends to use while we travelled. We saw the gear fall into the depths of the truck and just figured that we would recover it while unpacking in Texas. Only we didn’t see it at the end. With the trailer fully unpacked, we looked around the bare inside and the ground just outside and no gear appeared. After scouring around our boxes and coming up empty-handed, we drove into Helotes to buy a replacement piece at the local bike shop.
Helotes is not really the sort of place where you need detailed directions to find things. The bike shop, however, takes it to the extreme. Only a blind driver even stands a chance of not seeing the bikes spilling out of the two-story Helotes Bicycle, invading the sidewalk and threatening the street. Our first action upon dismounting the car was just to stand there and photograph the place.
We took a step inside. It was the only step we could take. Bikes from diverse eras in various states of repair clearly provided the building’s foundations. They occupied nearly every available space. We stood and stared, trying to take it all in. A thumping from upstairs preceded a call. “I’ll be right down!” Down the stairs came and older guy, sixties maybe, portly but fit and smiling. He moved with professional grace and a sense of tireless energy. I hope that I age as well as him. He introduced himself as Hank.
After quickly replacing the gear, I asked Hank how much I owed him. How does $5 sound?, he asked. It sounded like a steal. We then chatted for a while. He was happy to let us wander the premises, taking pictures of all the bikes strewn about the yard like a strange easter egg hunt.
I don’t sell bikes anymore, Hank explained. All of the ones you see here are mine. I just tinker on them now, as a hobby and do a few repairs for people, when needed. I have more bikes in my house, but I have to keep most of them here, so my wife doesn’t go crazy.
At some point in the conversation, Hank mentioned his time in the service (for non-US readers, “the service” always means military service). Being a former soldier myself, I asked a bit more and found that we had each been paratroopers, serving in sister units; him in the 101st and me in the 82nd. He described stumbling into the wrong barracks room in Vietnam and being told by a sleepy soldier of the 82nd, “you’re in the wrong nest, bird man.” The 82nd amicably refers to the 101st as the “Screaming Chickens” due to an unfortunate likeness on their unit crest. The 101st amicably refer to us as the “Alcoholics Anonymous” thanks to an unfortunate likeness on ours.
Next door to Hank’s bike shop sat a bar called John T. Floore’s Country Store. This, Hank explained to us, was the musical birthplace of Willie Nelson, who still sometimes stopped in to perform. Hank took us round back of his shop, where we could get a look at the stage. Several stacks of bicycles peered out at us on the way from under the vines that were slowly reclaiming them.
We ate some BBQ, a Texan staple, and drove back to the Fixin’ To under a sunset the color of gold in a hot forge.