November 12 to November 22, 2016
Lafayette, Louisiana
Route 10 west of New Orleans is one rough road, at least when you’re towing a lightweight Scamp. The road runs through the bayou on pilings and is a long series of low humps that set the whole rig a-vibrating in a bad way. We got an early start and made Lafayette by early afternoon. Brenda decamped with her friend Sheila that she met at Augusta cajun music camp. I consoled myself with dinner at Prejean’s restaurant. The next day the girls took off again for a day of sightseeing and cajun music while I took a long hike in a forest and walked around downtown Lafayette for a while. We would have liked to have stayed longer in cajun country, visiting some other people Brenda knows, going to some jams. Our original plan was to stay for the better part of a week and then go down the coast of Texas to Big Bend before turning north to Albuquerque sometime in early December. But Hillary asked if we could arrive before Thanksgiving to help with the kids because Tom was going east to spend the holiday with his mother and brothers. So we had to pick up the pace to shave more than a week off of our itinerary.
Coastal Texas
We did get a chance to explore some of Gulf-coastal Texas. Sea-Rim State Park south of Port Arthur is a nice park on the shore, but quite out of the way. To get to it you drive through, as in right through the middle of, several large oil refineries. Then you go along a shipping canal filled with tankers and other oil-industry-related vessels, some engaged in active work, some being repaired in the canal or in dry-dock, some abandoned and derelict. Then you drive a long ways through low grassy meadows of the type you find along seashores. We passed a number of historical markers but they came and went too fast for us to stop and read them. I think this area was important in the early history of Texas oil. Also a major battle in the war for Texas’ independence from Mexico took place nearby at Sabine Pass. There was a big ‘gator said to be in residence in an arm of the Gulf that reached next to our campsite but we didn’t see or hear him. The gulf shore was good for bike-riding and we went a long ways along the shore. The Gulf here is an unappealing brown thing with feeble surf.
Next day we jumped a few hours down the coast to Galveston Island State Park. The Jimmy Webb/Glen Campbell song (“Galveston, oh Galveston”) was constantly running in the background. I had always been curious about Galveston–the 1900 hurricane flood, its reputation as an “open city” in the first half of the 20th century.
The hurricane-spawned flood of 1900 resulted in between 8,000 to 12,000 deaths in Galveston, a city of 40,000 people at the time. It was the highest mortality from a natural disaster in US history. Accounts of the ordeal are harrowing. Prior to the flood Galveston was one of the most important cities in the country and on the make—banking, tourism, a cultural center, a shipping center, and an immigration port. After the flood the money fled and the town dried up. It was revived by Prohibition, or rather it was revived by flouting Prohibition. It became a sin city, the New Orleans of Texas. This persisted into the 1950s when city managers got all reform-minded and zealous. Some pinch-faced, bible-quoting, finger-wagging scold always comes along and ruins the party. Galveston likes to think it is on the rebound finally, and it does have a lively and appealing seaside, as well as an old town from the late 19th century that had been neglected but was intact and is being restored. I wish them luck.
Tom Rush recorded a couple albums of blues and folk covers in the early 1960s that were, and still are, among my favorite records. One of them featured a powerful, bluesy spiritual about the Galveston flood. The lyrics were striking and original, with the refrain “Wasn’t that a mighty storm.” Here is a link to a discographer’s research into the songs origins. The writer is a little prolix but the story is interesting. http://singout.org/2016/08/15/wasnt-that-a-mighty-storm/
I toured an industry-sponsored museum on offshore drilling. It made a passing mention to what most people call the BP oil spill and which they refer to as the Macondo oil spill. The museum had some neat, detailed models of various drilling platform designs, but I felt guilty about even being interested in the technology and forking over 6$. The museum is housed in a retired drilling platform and has an expansive view of Galveston harbor, a busy, dirty place. Across the harbor they are building drilling towers to be towed into the gulf. The cargo and industry ships that I saw were some of the rustiest and decrepit vessels I’ve ever seen afloat. Nice pelicans in the harbor, though.
Back out our campsite a few miles outside of town I stayed up late drinking rum with a guy who just gotten laid off from his oil industry job. His specialty was designing the software and hardware that guide the underground drills that extend from the platforms into the seabed. These drills don’t go straight down—they can be steered left-right-up-down to trace a path through multiple cells of oil that have been identified by various seismic tests, soil studies and other technologies. (I had just taken a tour of the gulf drilling museum and was able to work in some industry jargon and acronyms. I do love jargon.) I was being careful not to be too damning of the oil industry but thought he went a little overboard praising the preventive technologies and practices on today’s rigs. I told him that the industry might have designed all kinds of effective safeguards and practice guidelines but, in the end, the workers in the field will take the path of least resistance and do whatever makes their lives easier and makes the work go more quickly. He agreed, saying that he had only been on a platform twice and was appalled by the cavalier handling of materials by the roughnecks and their dismissive attitude toward standards and recommended practices. In any human endeavor—oil drilling, food preparation, finance– you can make all the regulations and requirements you can think of but you can’t legislate away human greed or incompetence. Human frailty will out.
Austin, TX
We booked a site at an RV camp right in the heart of Austin, on the south side of the Colorado River (not the Grand Canyon Colorado, another one.) There were lots of fine eating and music establishments just outside the camp. We ate at Threadgills, and went to the Highball Lounge to see Dale Watson and His Lonestars, a septet with a three-piece horn section that played swing music and had a loungey sort of style. Lots of dancers who all knew one another crowded the big dance floor and Brenda was asked to dance several times which she enjoyed. One of her partners was a friend of the bandleader’s and he took her up to meet Mr. Watson, a flashily-dressed, silver-haired baritone. Watson asked Brenda questions from the stage using his microphone (“are you above or below the Mason Dixon in your part of Maryland?”) and then dedicated a song about Baltimore to her. We had a grand time.
Next day we got together with our old friend Roy who has lived in Austin since the early 1990s. He showed us the sights–we took a tour of the state capitol building, hiked a few miles along Barton River.
That night we went to The Hole in the Wall Bar for a multi-artist tribute to an Austin favorite son the late Doug Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet). The most prominent musicians of the town came on stage one after another to perform one of Sahm’s songs so we got a whole showcase of the best local talent.
This period, from New Orleans to Austin, has been the most urban part of our trip and it was a nice change. We dined out, went to shows, and didn’t get in as much exercise as normal. And of course we went way over budget for those few weeks. But it was a really nice change of pace.
I was surprised to learn that Austin is the eleventh largest city in the US, larger in population than Boston or Baltimore. (In fact, of the eleven largest population cities, Texas has four of them.) Roy said that every day 115 people move to Austin. The evidence of this we saw was in the traffic; at least as congested as New York City at all times of day.
The Hill Country and West Texas
The Hill Country is a beautiful part of Texas, south central. Rolling hills, green, forested in places. LBJ’s ranch, a national park now, we paused at, just west of Johnson City. I had never seen this green part of Texas; all my traveling had been in the northern, more barren eco-zone.
We got as far as Junction, Texas before we started looking for a camp. The first park we found was closed for the winter. We wound up at North Junction RV Park on the North Llano River. Actually quite a nice, shaded park; clean and well-maintained. We took a walk along the river until someone started yelling at us from a distance and finally drove up to us on an ATV. The camouflage-clad young woman was not entirely unpleasant as she informed us that people in the vicinity were hunting and we were likely to get our heads blowed off if we continued in that direction. We went into the fair-sized town for groceries and I do not exaggerate when I say that every single person was clothed in camouflage. And every single establishment had a sign that said “Welcome Hunters” or something similar. No lie. Junction is the most hunting-obsessed town I have ever been in. Actually, after reading a local publication the city appears to be in the huntingest county, Kimble County. Hunting-related paraphernalia was on sale in the most unexpected places. An object I had never seen one of before, a device for feeding corn to game animals in the wild, I saw at least a hundred of, for sale in parking lots of all manner of stores. If I were to tarry in Junction Texas I think I would run out of conversational material, tout suit.
Next was an rv park right on Highway 10 in Balmorhea. A hand-lettered sign directed us to a simple trailer within the dusty compound. I knocked on the door, a guy opened it and said “twenty bucks,” so I gave him twenty bucks and he went back inside and I picked out a site. I don’t know, maybe he had the actual owner of the place tied up in that trailer. It was a treeless parking lot sort of place about half-tenanted with oil industry roughnecks. There was a saloon next door. I discouraged Brenda from coming with me, saying I should check it out first. Boy was that a good call. Four guys playing pool trying to top one another’s stories about being arrested for drunk driving and surviving the worst county and city jails in west texas. One guy, in the space of twenty minutes, told of three acts of violence he had committed against people he had just met who bothered him in some way. At night we could see a gas flare from an oil well in the near distance. It’s been getting cold these past few nights, like in the 40s. Our first chills since Canada, three months ago.
I reserved a spot at a New Mexico State Park at Leesburg Dam, just north of Las Cruces, near the town of Radium Springs. Nice facility—spacious sites, picnic tables in half-wall enclosures with roofs at each site. Miles of trails through the scrub and along the Rio Grande. Mountains in the distance in all directions. The Rio Grande is pretty played out by the time it gets here—it is a thin thread that barely seems to be flowing. It is renourished by other tributaries further south before reaching El Paso. We met a couple, fellow campers, down by the river who were from Severna Park, MD and old hands at camping in the southwest. Another couple we met at the park, from Saranac NY originally, have been traveling in their Scamp-like Casita for two years.
We left Radium Springs to follow the Rio Grande up to Albuquerque where we will stay a month in a little house our daughter is having built on her property. Happy thanksgiving and happy Holidays to all!