A New Old Birthday Camping Tradition

Posted on April 9, 2013 by admin

A few months have passed since I posted a blog about travel, or about anything not related to my recently released books (You’ve heard, right? Check out the links in the left sidebar.). A few things have changed in these months — I moved back to Texas, I got engaged, I got married, I became a step-mom, I moved again. Life is busy. Life is wonderful.

Last weekend was my first camping trip with my new family — my husband and four step-sons (ages 5, 7, 9, and 12). I’m so very outnumbered, but in general the boys do a good job of reminding each other to speak differently and keep the body noises to a minimum in the presence of a lady. We received lots of fun camping gear as wedding presents, and all six of us were excited to venture out on our first trip now that the weather is turning warmer.

Scoping out the best spot for our tents

In the past few years I’ve become accustomed to camping with a few friends or by myself, so it was a challenge to me to come up with all the food for six people for the weekend and make sure we didn’t forget anything important for meal preparation. I’m ok by myself winging it with peanut butter and honey sandwiches all weekend — I knew the boys, however, would not be satisfied with such little sustenance and variety. I planned and packed accordingly, and the boys ate like they were starving all weekend (heaven help us during the teen years). Of course, I had more than one cup of coffee from my trusty percolator during the weekend.

In the woods is the best place to drink coffee.

This was my third camping trip in a row on the first weekend of April. Two years ago my sister, brother-in-law, and I took my niece camping on spring break/Easter in the mountains of North Carolina. Last year my friend Jen and I went camping on Easter/my birthday in the Columbia River Gorge and the Oregon Coast. And this year, I decided that three years in a row means it’s now a tradition. From here out, our family will make every attempt to go camping on the first weekend of April/Easter/my birthday. It’s the beginning of a family tradition, and a very good tradition indeed.

Hiking through a nearby meadow

It was also our first trip with the boys where we used our new Texas State Parks annual pass. The past two years I’ve made good use of a National Parks annual pass. On our honeymoon Stephen and I phased out the National Parks pass a few days before it expired, and we purchased a State Parks pass to use over this year with the boys. So far we’ve visited (either as a couple or with the boys) Dinosaur Valley State Park, Monahans Sandhills, Davis Mountains, and now we’ve camped at Cleburne State Park. The boys enjoyed running around in the wilderness, climbing trees, playing in the dirt and the rocks — we didn’t even have time to take them to the lake this weekend at Cleburne, but they had a blast. With it being only 45 minutes from our house, I’m sure this will be a favorite camping spot for years to come.

Here’s to a new family tradition and the years to come!

A second round of Easter egg hunts — lots of great hiding places in the trees

We also hunted for bugs.

My fave part of camping — sitting and being still. For a moment.

Glow sticks after sundown

Return to Texas and the Grandest Adventure

Posted on October 15, 2012 by admin

The past decade plus a couple of years have been one adventure after another — here, there, and everywhere else, a lifetime of experience packed into my late twenties and thirties. Many years on roads in the mountains of Yunnan. Countless hours spent with Lydia, with roommates, learning to be a true friend and a sister. Coffee trees and alphabets. Jungle hikes and arctic flights. Raspberries in Wyoming, buses through Laos, a garden in Washington. Two completed book manuscripts and a third on the way. A lifetime of experience, one adventure after another.

I’ve written of love from time to time on the blog, but mostly I’ve kept my personal trials off the internet. Those who know me well, though, know that these last few years have been filled with both wonder and pain. There’s always been a longing in the roaming, a desire for the constancy and rootedness that have remained so long out of reach.

Now the grandest adventure of all begins, the one that has led me home to my own place of stability. Now begins the joy and delight of adventuring every day in relationship and in family. The years of rootlessness and wandering have taught me that this life of following Jesus is a pilgrim life — I am a stranger in a strange land, and my citizenship is in heaven. But I breathe the greatest sigh of relief to think those years of moving around are over. I am still a pilgrim on this earth, but now I will not walk alone. I don’t know how much I’ll write on this blog about this new adventure, though I can assure my four or five faithful readers that my writing adventures will continue on this website. For now I’m settling back into life in Texas and into this new season.

Other People’s Thoughts: Bosque County Romance

Posted on May 9, 2012 by admin

When I first moved to Yunnan in 2000, my cousin sent with me a two-CD album of cover songs by Lyle Lovett for the purpose, she said, of reminding me of Texas. Step Inside This House became my “homesick music” over the next decade in China. The album lives and breathes home for me. If you’re not familiar with it, you should change that. Each of the songs is poetry in the form of words and guitar. I regularly included selections from the album on my playlist when I worked at Mountain Cafe — it just made me happy, in a simple way, to be in tropical Xishuangbanna, palm trees overhead and fruity drink in hand, to hear Lyle singing “Texas River Song” or mentioning places like Waco or Abilene.

Now that I’m back in the States, the songs from Step Inside This House continue to make my regular playlist. I wrote on the blog last August how “West Texas Highway” and “Ballad of the Snow Leopard and the Tanqueray Cowboy” were part of my soundtrack as I looked through my grandparents’ photos and schemed about putting together a book on West Texas. Not long after, that book began taking more definite shape, and I continue to turn to those songs for writing inspiration. As I interviewed my grandparents earlier this year, they would often have the satellite on their TV turned to the honky tonk radio channel, and many of the songs from Step Inside This House would come up, though in their original recordings, rather than in Lyle’s versions — those songs literally became a soundtrack to the book, as my voice recorder picked up the music in the background while we conducted our interviews. Then, when I spent a few extra days in the Fort Davis area after Pat and Randy headed home from our road trip in March, I mainly chose these CDs as my playlist for my solo drives.

And now, as I’m 50+ pages into the writing of the first draft of West Texas Interlude, I come to the part of the story where Bob D and Ann (my grandparents) tell of how they got married at ages 20 and 18, set off in their car for the desert, and started raising a family in the dust and drought of 1950s West Texas. How could I not think of “Bosque County Romance,” the third song in Steven Fromholz’s “Texas Trilogy” that opens the second disk of Step Inside This House? Change the names Billy and Mary to Bob and Ann, and it sounds so similar to stories I’ve heard from my grandparents. It’s a beautiful song, with Alison Krauss singing harmony.

The song is a story of love built on more than passing emotion, built on a life lived together working in the same direction. It’s the same story of love I see in my grandparents — it’s one of many things I’ve learned and seen in them that I aspire to as well.

I’d love to embed a video of it here, but alas, I could not find one. Here are a few of the lyrics instead:

Mary Martin was a schoolgirl

Just seventeen or so

When she married Billy Archer

About fourteen years ago

Not even out of high school

Folks said it wouldn’t last

But when you grow up in the country

You grow up mighty fast

They married in a hurry

In March before school was out

Folks said that she was pregnant,

“Just wait and you’ll find out.”

It came about that winter

One gray November morn

The first of many more to come

A baby boy was born…

Now Billy kept what cattle

His daddy could afford

Bouncing across the cactus

In a 1950 Ford

The cows were sick and skinny

And the weeds was all that grew

But Billy kept the place alive

The only thing he knew

And Mary cooked the supper

And Mary scrubbed the clothes

And Mary busted horses

And blew the baby’s nose

And Mary and a shotgun

Kept the rattlesnakes away

How she kept on smiling

No one one could ever say…

Fort Davis, Texas

Posted on March 14, 2012 by admin

The Stone Village Tourist Camp in Fort Davis is to quirky hangouts and people-watching what the Eleven Inn in Balmorhea was to peace and relaxation.

Before Pat made our reservation, she called me to let me know what the sleeping arrangements would be like. She and Randy got a little motel room at this renovated 1935 facility, and I got a “camp room.”

My camp room reminded me of rural guesthouses I’ve stayed at many times in China, with a separate public bathroom a few doors down from where I slept. Well, that’s not an entirely fair assessment — the Stone Village camp rooms are clean and have an aesthetically pleasing decor, so the comparison to a Chinese guesthouse does eventually break down. My room had concrete floors and stone walls, while Pat and Randy’s room (with private bath) had wood floors and finished walls.

The thing that caught me off guard when I first saw my camp room was the entryway. There wasn’t a solid door — the entire front of the room was a screen. One section of the screen opens, and a thick curtain pulls across to give the semblance of privacy. The curtain doesn’t shut all the way, and since my room faced the main driveway leading to the highway, I felt a bit like I was on display the entire time I was in the room. I was also a little concerned at first that I might get cold at night, since the desert sky was mostly clear and the temperature would drop with the sun, but the down comforter on my bed kept me very toasty all night. Overall, I had a comfortable stay and would recommend the camp room if you’re wanting to sleep in a bed instead of a tent, but don’t want to shell out the money for a private bath.

The next morning, I wandered from my bed to the Stone Village Market across the courtyard — a fun little whole foods store where you can sit on the front patio under dried chilies and wildflowers and watch the town wake up. I drank a couple of cups of the West Texas Wildfire roast from Big Bend Coffee Roasters in Marfa (with agave nectar and organic half-and-half added), wrote a few postcards, and savored the lazy morning before getting back in the car for our next destination: Sanderson, Langtry, and the Pecos River Bridge.

Balmorhea, TX, pop. 435

Posted on March 13, 2012 by admin

It took me approximately 5 minutes after our arrival at Eleven Inn in Balmorhea to decide I wanted to come back and stay a few more days. We weren’t even planning to stay in Balmorhea when we first marked out our itinerary for this trip for West Texas Interlude, but every hotel in Pecos is currently booked solid by oil companies doing new drilling. Ironic that I’m taking a trip to visit towns once prosperous in the 1950s that have supposedly been in decline for decades because of the end of the West Texas oil boom and the building of I-20 to replace old Highway 80…and we couldn’t find a hotel on I-20 because of a new oil boom.

The boom worked in our favor by sending us to Balmorhea for the night. There are eleven rooms at Eleven Inn, each with its own quirky furniture and chenille bedspread. My room had a fuzzy stool at a wooden desk, two “distressed” nightstands (certainly not distressed to make them appear shabby chic, but distressed naturally over the years), a comfy bed, and a tiny tv perched on the top shelf of the closet. I never turned on the tv, but opted to listen instead to the glorious quiet of a motel courtyard located away from the highway. This morning I heard a rooster and what I think might have been the motel owner singing in the yard.

We made a stop at the state park and the famous pool filled by San Solomon Springs — 1 million gallons of water per hour gurgle out of the spring into the 3.5 million gallon pool, whose overflow heads to Balmorhea Lake and nearby irrigation channels. Tiny fish bumped against our toes when we dangled our feet over the concrete edge into the water that maintains a constant 72-76 degree temperature year-round.

Before leaving this morning for Fort Davis, I checked with the owners of Eleven Inn to see if they would have space for me to come back the following weekend. No worries — spring break will be over by then, and I should be able to come and sit for a while. Pat and Randy will head back to Denton on Sunday, but I think I’ll stay behind and enjoy the quiet, write in the mornings, hike in the Davis Mountains in the afternoons, and stare up at the star-filled sky at night.

Monahans Sandhills

Posted on March 12, 2012 by admin

You really should roll down a sandhill if you get a chance. Afterwards, be prepared to find sand in your pockets, in the cuffs of your rolled up jeans, in your ears, in your belly button, in between your teeth, and stuck to the chapstick on your lips — but it’s worth the experience.

photos by Randy Hatcher

We brought along a cardboard box and a couple of lids from plastic containers to use as sleds, but had no luck getting them to slide down the dunes. Everyone else we saw (including a girl in a styrofoam box) had a similar problem: you get going a little ways, and the edge of your sliding device plows into the sand and gets stuck.

The visitor’s center has plastic disks and surfboards available for rental, but they also have a sign posted saying they cannot guarantee disks or boards will slide. I’m just not willing to risk attempting a slide on rented gear without such a guarantee.

(Thank you, Aunt Pat, for playing in the sand with me — and thank you, Randy, for being a wonderful trip photographer.)

Jacksboro, TX

Posted on February 7, 2012 by admin

On these past two research trips to Texas for West Texas Interlude, my grandparents and I have driven into town from their place two or three times a week. “Town” can mean a couple of different places, but the town I’ve come to enjoy the most is Jacksboro, about 25 miles from their house. The county seat of Jack County, it’s the town where my grandfather came to high school from his childhood home in nearby Joplin and my grandmother came from her home in Wizard Wells. In the first year after Conoco sent my grandfather back from West Texas to work out of Fort Worth, the family lived at Wizard Wells, and my dad went to seventh grade in town at Jacksboro — “the year John F. Kennedy was killed,” my grandmother remembers. 1963.

When I was 8 or 9 years old, I remember piling into my grandmother’s car with my cousins and sister to go to Fort Richardson State Park at Jacksboro. Almost as vivid is my memory of a hamburger eaten on a picnic table at a roadside burger joint on the way home from that trip. Burgers are better when eaten outdoors, juice dripping from the fresh tomato, accompanied by a milkshake.

I found out in November that my memory is of Herd’s Hamburgers, a Jacksboro fixture since 1916. The picnic tables are still there in the parking lot, and you have two choices for indoor seating: old Coke crates or old wooden school desks. My grandparents and I ordered burgers and ate them in the parking lot while they reminisced about the price of meals when they were younger — my grandmother says that in high school they would often go to Herd’s for lunch because you could get a burger, Coke, and candy bar for 25 cents, compared to 35 cents for a meal in the school cafeteria. Part of what makes the burgers taste so flavorful today is that they are still using the same griddle from when they opened 96 years ago. That is one well-seasoned griddle.

I’ve had several opportunities to go by the Rexall Pharmacy at City Drug to pick up prescriptions with my grandparents in recent weeks — I really like this photo because I managed to get both the drug store sign and the reflection of old buildings on the city square.

Last week was the first time I had a chance to sit at the counter with the old soda fountain — my mom and I stopped by for a malt when we drove into town to pick up some stuff at the hardware store.

My grandfather told me later in the afternoon, “If we got a malt when we went to town, we thought we were in high cotton.” I can just picture him there as a little kid, putting down 10 cents on the counter for a malt in a thin glass with a tall spoon. That mental picture is why I prefer heading to Jacksboro to pick up groceries or prescriptions, rather than into the bigger towns with WalMart and Starbucks.

January Research Trip

Posted on January 31, 2012 by admin

I’ve just about caught up with sorting through photos and notes on scraps of paper and in my little spiral at this point on my second research trip for my work-in-progress, the nonfiction book West Texas Interlude. I spent most of last week at my grandparents’ place in Boonsville, before my aunt and I headed out on a two day trip to West Texas.

As happened on my first research trip in November 2011, many of my best recordings and notes were made while driving to doctor appointments for my grandfather or hovering behind my grandmother while she stirred something on the stove. I’ve done quite a bit of driving in the counties near where they live, as well as riding around on the Polaris Ranger or walking on their place. I haven’t seen as many deer as I did last fall, but a few are still hanging around. One morning I saw the largest jackrabbit I’ve ever seen, bouncing out of the brush near where I’d pulled over my truck on the gravel road. My grandmother and I spotted the red-tailed hawk that we’d seen a couple of times in November, and I couldn’t begin to count the cardinals that have flitted back and forth in front of me on the road or in the front yard, their vibrant feathers brightening up the dull browns of a January landscape in Texas.

Over the weekend, my aunt and I found ourselves in Stamford, Aspermont, Snyder, and Sweetwater. We were on a quest to find rent houses, an apartment, a motel, a couple of churches, an elementary school, and a roadside park where my grandfather played baseball on the Conoco team in 1950. We took photos all along the way, less for me to post online, more to show my grandparents (who would have come along for the ride if they could).

My favorite house that we found was this one in Aspermont (pop. 1021). A couple of ladies we talked to at the Pony Espresso cafe near the square in Aspermont surmised that this is the one where my grandparents rented an upstairs apartment as their first home after their wedding in 1950. Wouldn’t it make a perfect haunted house in a movie?

I love the dormers and the quirky diamond-shaped windows.

Alas, my grandmother took one look at the photos and announced that this was not the house where they lived. Our new friends at the Pony Espresso knew of no other house in town that was large enough to be divided into apartments that fit the bill, so we’re left to assume the house is gone.

Back to organizing photos and transcribing interviews…

South or Southwest?

Posted on January 6, 2012 by admin

Is Texas part of the South, or the Southwest, or its own culture?

This is not a border area militia Rick Perry secessionist question. That kind of talk irritates me to no end, almost as much as hearing jokes about Waco and the Branch Davidian compound when I tell people I went to Baylor (sic ‘em Bears and RG3).

I started thinking about this question again over the holidays, as I made black eyed peas for dinner in keeping with the southern tradition. FYI, all-knowing online sources state that black eyed peas and greens on New Year’s Day are a token for prosperity in the year to come, although I’m pretty sure when I was little and asked my mom why we eat them, the answer was “because we do.”

Black eyed peas on New Year’s is a decidedly southern tradition, not solely a Texas one. But I find that since moving to Washington, I don’t often claim to be from the “South.” I make a clear distinction that I’m from Texas and that it’s different from other southern states. I say this not out of Texas pride — I never say things like “everything’s bigger and better in Texas,” I don’t call it God’s Country, and you will never hear me say “hook ‘em Horns.” I am proud of Texas, but I also like a lot of other places I’ve been.

I think I’m making a cultural distinction here. In a lot of ways, Texas isn’t like the rest of the South (the Deep South, which I guess is really more accurately the Southeast). I grew up eating way more tamales and sopaipillas than someone from Georgia or Alabama. And yes, my family actually has a ranch, and my dad, uncle, and grandfather are honest-to-goodness cowboys, though some say that’s a stereotype of Texas. Stereotypes have to come from somewhere, right?

I started making the distinction in my mind that Texas belongs more to the Southwest than the South a few years ago when I was hiking in Tiger Leaping Gorge in northern Yunnan, China, of all places. At a guesthouse in the gorge I met and hung out with a couple from Arizona, and the guy said to me, “You’re from Texas? Then we’re cousins from the Southwest.” (He also later told me he loved me, right in front of his girlfriend, because I was traveling with only a small backpack while she had a large suitcase — but that’s another story, let me get back on track, we’ll talk later about guys who’ve declared their love for me while dating someone else.) That casual comment about the Southwest really caused me to think (you have a lot of time to do that while hiking through a gorge and riding long haul buses across Yunnan), and since that time, I have associated myself as a Texan more with the Southwest than with the South. Maybe that explains part of my reasoning behind wanting to write West Texas Interlude — a desire to head to the desert and deepen my connection with the Southwest.

Yet, there are still some things about Texas that are more southern than not. Like black eyed peas on New Year’s. And Bible Belt culture. And the word y’all. I can’t say that sweet tea is one of those things, though, because you’re just as likely as not to find unsweetened tea in the pitcher in my family’s fridge.

Opinions?

Writing about Family

Posted on November 29, 2011 by admin

Writing about family members is a terrifying venture.

I have spent the past 2 1/2 weeks asking my grandparents questions about their lives, recording their answers — while hovering near my grandmother as she sliced brisket to put in the freezer, while sitting on the ottoman at my grandfather’s feet as he flipped through photos on my iPad and recalled the locations and stories belonging to the images. I have attempted to piece together the equipment and techniques involved in land surveying as described by my father and grandfather, men who have known the ins and outs of the profession for decades, to the point that they no longer remember what is common knowledge to mankind and what is only known to surveyors. I don’t even know what it is I don’t know, and I have struggled at times to come up with interview questions. But now I’ve learned what a theodolite is, what a bearing is, how to turn an angle, how to identify a monument or find a corner, and next I will sort out the best way to describe it in the context of West Texas Interlude.

I have 15 hours of recordings from the first research trip and am daunted by the prospect of piecing together the information that belongs to each town, each photo. How will I decide which photos to include, which stories to write, which stories to summarize and which to elaborate upon? How will I organize it all? Which towns will I need to skim over and which ones will require intensive research? Should I focus more on the vacation spots featured in the photos, or on the little towns where the family may have lived for only a few weeks at a time?

But more daunting than any of that — the technical aspects and the artistic decisions — is the prospect of writing a story whose main characters are ones I sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with every year. Ones who held me as an infant. Ones whose opinion and good favor I value more than just about anyone in the world. They are trusting me with their stories, and I will strive to do my best to write them well. I long to approach the stories and the background research with an objective mind, but I cannot deny that my own memories and impressions, my own point of view as a Henderson, color the picture that I lay out on paper. And since I’ve said from the beginning that the book will be a collection of Bob and Ann’s photos and stories combined with my own experience visiting the places they lived, I think it’s OK to allow my impressions to color the process. Still, I tremble at the thought of trying to capture the character of my family on paper, fearful of what they will think of my words, of what I include and what I leave out.

Rebecca Henderson

writing, reading, living

Tag Archives: Texas