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Posts Tagged ‘Texas’
July 23rd, 2009
by Ned
 The drive from Boerne to El Paso was long, but incredibly beautiful. I don’t think any of us on the bus had ever seen anything quite like the stark, arid beauty of that long stretch of Interstate 10. The mountains off in the distance were magnificent, but the thing that really made that place a wonder to behold was what came later, at night. And here I apologize, because my trusty little Exilim camera doesn’t have the horsepower to capture what we saw then.
After the sun had completely set, the stars came out. And because we were on a highway that had taken us perhaps hundreds of miles away from anything resembling populated civilization, there was no light pollution to be seen anywhere. When I stuck my head out the window and looked up, I was treated to the first completely unimpeded vision of the night sky that I had ever experienced in my entire life.
Somewhere around midnight, still racing to get Max to the airport on time the next day, we pulled over for five minutes or so on the shoulder. As John changed a filter in the veggie oil system, the rest of us stood outside and quietly directed our gazes upward. There are so many more stars visible with the naked eye than I had ever imagined from living in suburbia and then New York City. I had never seen the Milky Way before, but that night I did.
The next day, Max said that he now intended to live in the southwest at some point in his life, based almost entirely on what he saw in that night sky. I wouldn’t go that far, but I think it goes without saying that everyone should experience a sky like that at least once. I’m not sure where else you can find one like it in the whole country, but it’s worth the trek.
Tags: Texas
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July 22nd, 2009
by Ned
 I-10 has one of the highest speed limits in the country at 80 miles-per-hour, but weren’t able to take advantage of the added speed while driving to El Paso — poor old Anne Marie has a top speed of 55, maybe 60 mph, if you’re going downhill. Still, we made pretty good time getting to the El Paso airport, and saw some pretty amazing sights along the way. We were fortunate that 10 runs right alongside the border with Mexico — it’s a truly remarkable thing to be able to go along the border with another country and individual homes in their cities. We took advantage of our proximity to eat some truly great Mexican food, reluctantly deposited Max at the airport in time for his flight, and then hunted for a Wal-Mart to spend the night at.
Another sign of how close we were to Mexico: Maybe a solid fifth of the cars in the parking lot where we stopped had license plates from Chihuahua, Mexico. I heard as much Spanish within the Wal-Mart as English — possibly more.
Spending the night in El Paso was a lot like spending the night in Sulphur, Louisiana — in both places, we met many more friendly, generous people than could ever be reasonably expected. Case in point: the bar and grill where we stopped to fill up on vegetable oil, and where one of the bar patrons, after roughly ten minutes of talking to Peter, offered us a place to crash for the night. Because we needed to get an early start, and because it was such a hassle to move the bus from a Wal-Mart to a residential area, we declined.
Then there was our neighbor, Roger. He pulled up alongside our bus in an immaculately maintained school bus of his own, which he said he used as a mobile home and base of operations in his capacity as a professional trucker. Roger was a 62 year-old Burmese Vietnam vet, with some of the strangest stories I’ve ever heard — over the course of the night, he gave a brief lecture on computer science, told us about the time when he worked with Bill Gates, and the few times he met Barack Obama back when he (Obama) was in the Illinois legislature. Best of all was his description of the elephant he still owned back in Burma, but had not seen in 45 years, an apparently affectionate pachyderm by the name of Cha-Cha.
To be honest, I have no idea how much of what he told us is true. It’s all unverifiable, and completely outlandish, but with just enough supporting detail so that it doesn’t sound like a lie. We’ve met a lot of people like that. But it isn’t whether or not what these people tell us is true, but how much it matters if it’s true. Either way, the stories we hear on this trip captivate all of us.
Tags: Add new tag, Texas
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July 21st, 2009
by Ned
 We were well into West Texas when we found the town of Boerne, a strange little gem surrounded by what seemed to be miles and miles of relatively nondescript rural Texas. The local coffee shop granted us thirty gallons or so of their waste veggie oil, and so while John filled up the bus, the rest of us, one after the other, all sheepishly retreated into the coffee shop’s air conditioned confines.
The place wasn’t exactly what I had come to expect from a rural Texan community center. Most of the towns we’ve rolled through of Boerne’s size (about 6,000 people) have had fried chicken shacks and other kinds of greasy diners for their public houses. But here, incongruously, was a place that reminded me very much of the sort of hip little cafés that spring up around New England college towns. The business cards on one table in the center advertised local arts and crafts, there was free wi-fi, and a large menu of all sorts of elaborate drinks that ostensibly had some sort of coffee content to them.
I talked to the two baristas there — local girls, born and raised — and tried to get them to explain to me how a tiny little artistic enclave like this with a music shop and used bookstore came about in one of the more isolated areas of the United States of Cormac McCarthy. They just smiled and shrugged, apparently amused that this credulous Northerner was excited to be in sleepy little Boerne.
At least one thing I did learn about the town was that there was a heavy Austrian presence, culturally speaking. We were lucky enough to stumble upon the coffee shop the day of the week that the Austrian Economics Club met in one of the back rooms — I wasn’t able to attend, but I asked the manager, a member of the club himself, about it. He described it as a club where like-minded individuals gathered to discuss the value of free market economics and brush up on their Friedrich Hayek. Their closed-door discourse on capitalism lasted well after the café’s closing time, but they still broke in time to go to a park about a block away. As we drove by and off into the west, we caught a glimpse of a group of costumed musicians playing traditional Austrian polka for a crowd there.
Tags: Friedrich Hayek, Texas
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July 20th, 2009
by Ned
After a couple of days spent in a state park outside of Austin, it was time to get Max to the airport. He had to get from El Paso back for Connecticut in three days, and we still had 600 miles of ground to cover for that to happen–plus, we were low on fuel.
The result was slow going at first. We were just entering west Texas. We found plenty of grill and barbecues spots, but waste vegetable oil was scarce. It took us a whole day of only marginally fruitful searching for fuel to get us to San Antonio for the night. 100 miles down, 500 to go.
Now we were in west Texas, the hardcore Texas of legend that made our ridiculous secession fib seem semi-plausible.
In the San Antonio Wal-Mart parking lot, we ended up parked next to Richard, a guy living out of his car in the same parking lot who spent three hours or so hovering around the bus, telling us about the ministry he used to be a member of. The conversation frequently turned to the Bible and bits and pieces of Biblical trivia when he was around — for example, Richard’s assertion that the pyramids at Egypt couldn’t possibly be as old as “science” told us, since the earth is only 6,000 years old.
The temptation to argue any one of these points was strong, but I resisted. Richard was obviously pretty lonely, as anyone occupying a Wal-Mart parking lot alone on a nightly basis would be. I didn’t want to tarnish what was probably one of his few recent lengthy conversations with other, attentive human beings. So, in a minor lapse in my adherence to the blogger code, I managed to keep my mouth shut.
We get an early start the next morning. We had little fuel, and two days to travel 500 miles. It was going to be one of the more frantic sprints of the entire trip.
Tags: Max Wareham, Texas
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July 16th, 2009
by Ned
We have this practical joke we do on people we meet. I should probably be less proud of it than I am. But with the understanding that you’ll probably never see most of the people you encounter on the road comes the desire to take advantage of it, just by messing with them a little bit.
It generally goes like this: When people ask where we’re going, one of us well say, well, we were looking forward to going through Texas, but we don’t have our passports, so now we probably can’t. The other person will express confusion, and we’ll say, wait, haven’t you heard? Texas seceded earlier today. Then, since I’m the sole politics junkie on the bus, I’ll usually provide a bunch of convincing corroborating details, like what John Cornyn had to say about it and the fact that Rick Perry’s the new president of the Republic of Texas.
It’s interesting seeing how people react. The weird thing is that most of them buy it. I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly good liar, but we’ve gotten this one prank down to a science. Very few people feel terribly strongly about the secession, since it often doesn’t affect their lives that directly. When we were in Austin, Texas, we switched it up from Texas to Vermont, and the people who we told it to toasted the new Republic of Vermont.
Sometimes we let people in on the joke on our way out, in which case they’re invariably amused. But sometimes we don’t. I’m pretty sure there are at least a couple people who, two weeks after we bid farewell, still believe that America is comprised of 49 states. One person who we told it to ran inside his house to check Google News, and when we realized that he was onto us, we convinced him to play along to fool the rest of his friends. I’m not sure what it says about people that he was so willing to sustain the joke — or, for that matter, that other people that they keep believing it so willingly. It’s probably best not to worry about it; it’s all in good fun.
Tags: jokes, Texas
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The drive from Boerne to El Paso was long, but incredibly beautiful. I don’t think any of us on the bus had ever seen anything quite like the stark, arid beauty of that long stretch of Interstate 10. The mountains off in the distance were magnificent, but the thing that really made that place a wonder to behold was what came later, at night. And here I apologize, because my trusty little Exilim camera doesn’t have the horsepower to capture what we saw then.
