I went for a bit of a walk in the very picturesque Prairie Creek Park here in Richardson. The place was crawling with photographers – most of them pros, lugging huge lenses, and carefully posing children, couples, or recent graduates along the rocks of the waterfall or in the fading patches of bluebonnets and other wildflowers.
Off to the side, a man was sitting on a metal park bench playing an ancient metal clarinet. He had a bag of sheet music at his feet and he’d select a piece, clip it into his music holder, and then play. Nobody was paying any attention to him.
Somehow, surfing around the web, looking for information on the area near where I live and work, I stumbled across a tiny little article about a place called McKamy Springs, Richardson, Texas. The page told about a historic spring that was once used by the Native Americans as a reliable water source while hunting buffalo on the open prairie. There was a crude black and white photograph of a spring inclosed in a brick dome. Below the dome a small stream of bright water poured out.
McKamy Spring - historical photo
The spring had been bricked over sometime in the past and a commemorative stone placed beside it. The stone said, “The Yoiuane tribe of the Caddo group of Indians lived here as early as 1690 to 1840. They hunted buffalo and deer on the prairie. They used McKamy Spring as a watering place. It was from these friendly Tejas Indians that Texas got her name.”
Well, there isn’t much open prairie in these here parts nowadays – so I wondered if the spring was still there. I noticed that there was a small park called McKamy Springs Park in the middle of a new transit oriented development called Brick Row in Richardson along my way to work. I rode my bicycle there once while working out a bike route to work.
I remembered a nice, peaceful, little park in the place – I stopped there to rest and drink a water bottle. I didn’t notice a spring… but I wasn’t looking for one. Could the little McKamy Spring still be down there?
While I was out and about, it didn’t take much to stop by and take a look. Sure enough, the spring was there, exactly as it was in the photo (only now it was in color). Only a pitiful dribble of water trickled out, but I know how wonderful a trickle like that can be in a dry country. Green algae was growing over the stream and I had to climb down to fish out a discarded water bottle and a shopping bag.
Still, it seems cool to me that the little spring is still there, spitting out a bit of groundwater, even if it is surrounded by kids on a playground, locals walking their dogs, and folks sneaking out for a smoke. The open plains, the deer and the buffalo are long gone, but little McKamy Spring is still hanging in there.
McKamy Spring today.
The spring is in a nice little park in the center of a big mixed-use development.
A while back I wrote about our little daytrip down to the Deep Ellum Arts Festival. We always try to go around noon on Sunday because that is when the Pet Parade is, and the guaranteed cornucopia of dogs makes Candy happy. She likes the canines, I get a kick out of the hipster doofuses. The parade was led by a parrot riding a remote controlled toy jeep.
I dug through my files and copied some of the photographs onto a thumb drive to transfer over to Candy’s computer for her enjoyment and thought I’d share them with y’all.
My son Lee (visiting from New Orleans for the weekend) and a new friend.
After a while, do people start to look like their pets?....
The news is spreading. Also, as the city prepares to open their much-ballyhooed park that has been built over the Woodall Rogers freeway – it has been “discovered” that the glare from the tower raises the temperature in the park significantly. Now, everyone is getting pissed off – though not as much as me.
There are some updates:
– D Magazine has done an extensive and interesting article about the tower and the politics behind it. Read this… it is fascinating stuff – even if you don’t give a damn about Dallas: D Magazine – The Towering Inferno How Museum Tower threatens the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Woodall Rodgers roofdeck park, two of the most prized assets of the city’s vaunted Arts District.
Finally, the chairman of the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Trustees has a video saying that they have everything under control. He says they have been unfairly blamed for the problem. – He makes a good speech, but the building is still there – cooking everything within reach of its reflected laser beams. He says he’ll fix it – I’ll believe it when I see it.
It bugs me that he talks about all these architects, consultants, and experts they have hired. How about Renzo Piano, the architect of the Nasher. He has made his opinion very clear and he isn’t happy. It sounds to me like the Dallas Police and Fire Pension fund has hired a bunch of hacks and are trying to convince us they know more that the Pritzker Prize winner.
During the week I sometimes see something cool surfing around and make a note to put a link to it up on my friday blog entry. But a day later the thing has gone viral, everybody knows about it, and I have to take it off.
Here’s one of those – you’ve probably seen it, but if you haven’t, you should.
ALL ABOUT COFFEE:
What is Coffee?
The History of Coffee
Ten Steps to Coffee
How to Store Coffee
How to Brew Coffee
The Value of Coffee
Coffee Recipes
Roasting Types
Coffee From the World
From the Seed to the Cup
This last Saturday, looking for something to do, I discovered a Food Truck Block Party at the Ginger Man in uptown. So we took the DART train down to the underground Cityplace Station and climbed up to the surface.
The other night I saw a piece on television about how the DC government can’t keep the escalators going to their subway stations. Dallas doesn’t do any better. The Cityplace Station is ten stories underground and customers use six sets of escalators or three elevators to reach the surface. Only one escalator (the lowest up escalator) and none of the elevators were functioning. That wasn’t a problem for us – we could walk the stairs, but it was a real pain for some others. One homeless guy with a huge cart full of his belongings was trapped – he had ridden up the one working escalator up to an intermediate landing and now he couldn’t go any farther up or even back down.
We did reach the surface and as we emerged, blinking, into the sunlight I saw that our timing was perfect. The streetcar was right there. It was the Green Dragon, and it was on the turntable... and it was turning. I have been wanting to watch that thing spin since it was installed and finally I saw it.
We rode the Green Dragon down to Boll street and walked a short distance to the block party. A parking lot next to the Ginger Man was full of about a half-dozen food trucks serving food and desserts. Inside the place was a big crowd, live music, and a large assortment of beers.
Some of the food trucks had made food to co-ordinate with certain special beers being sold at the Ginger Man. The trucks had printed up little guides with the list of beers and what food would go good with each choice. I thought that was cool – sort of like a poor-man’s gourmet wine tasting.
As always, when faced with a choice of food trucks, I chose the one I had never tried before. There was only one new one (I am cutting a pretty wide swath through the still growing Dallas food truck scene) – I had heard of it before, The Little Vessel Grill.
Their menu looked good – a prix fixe – each item was seven bucks. I chose the item on the top of the menu – the Tomato Bisque Soup and Grilled Cheese (Fire in the Hole) – because it was the first item on the menu. Candy chose the second item, the BBQ Pork Sandwich (Barque at the Moon) because… it was a BBQ Pork Sandwich.
Little Vessel Grill Menu
It was very good.
We had plans to go some other places, but there were specialty beers to try, other food trucks to visit, and a place full of interesting people (and a few dogs) so we ended up going nowhere else and riding the train back home (after walking down ten stories of steps) as the sun set.
I didn’t feel like it (I was exhausted and my head was pounding) but I went for a little bike ride after work. My bike was in the back of the car so I drove down to the nearby Forest Lane train station – one that the Cottonwood Trail runs by. I changed clothes in the car, which is difficult for me, and pulled the bike out of the hatchback, which is easy. While I was getting my shit together I noticed this advertising sign stuck in the grass border around the parking lot.
For Family & Friends
This saddens me. Not so much that somebody has started a shuttle service to the local prisons (For Family and Friends) – if there is a need, there should be someone to fill it. It saddens me that there is such a need.
And look at that bus! I can see chartering a van to take my friends and family for an afternoon visit at the slammer… but who could fill up that bus? That thing has a dual rear axle – that’s a serious hunk of bus there. Are they are thinking about more than mere visits? That bus would be useful for a prison break. You could take a whole unit over the fence and drive them to a nice afternoon at a baseball game all for one low price. I wish that was true… over the obvious fact that there are enough folks up the river that you can fill a bus up on visiting day.
Across the parking lot is a cheap gas station that has a constant flow of shady characters moving in and out with bags full of bottles. I guess the people that run the shuttle service figured out (maybe with extensive research and a focus group or two) that friends and relatives of incarcerated jailbirds tend to walk through this lot – maybe carrying their cheap booze to the train. People riding the train with alcohol won’t have a car they can drive to the pen. They would need a shuttle.
I haven’t seen that ad anywhere else.
So I climbed on my bike and went for a short ride. My head never stopped pounding, so I only went a half-dozen miles or so, stopping at a shady bench to read a short story on my Kindle. While I was loading my bike back in the car for the trip home I watched a few folks walk through the lot… but nobody asked for a pen so they could write the phone number down.
The looping trails through the Spring Creek Natural Area converge on a little footbridge over the creek. There is a nice bench there - a good place to rest and get away from the city for a few minutes.
This is the time of the year full of those rare North Texas days of cool mornings and warm afternoons. I can feel the killer heat of summer crouched on the horizon, ready to pounce. But in the meantime, it is so nice, so much of a shame to be cooped up in a cubicle for so many hours. When the whistle sounds, I want to be outside – to capture as much of this time as I can in preparation for the blazing oven season ahead.
There is this spot – the Spring Creek Natural area – where the concrete bike riding trails enter some thick creekbottom floodplain woods and loop around to give a bicycle rider the illusion of being outside of the city for a few minutes.
Candy and I have swapped cars for a few days. The car I have now is a tiny hatchback – much smaller than the one I drive on most days. With the back seats folded, however, I discovered my bicycle can fit in the back without even taking either wheel off. Maybe I’ll keep driving this car and carry my bike with me – get in some quick rides in different parts of the city. Maybe I don’t have to spent my money on a folding bike.
Candy was worried about leaving my bike in the car. “I bought it for used for ninety dollars twenty years ago,” I told her. I remember now, I was saving to buy a bike and then found this one at a pawn shop. I figured it could get me by until I saved enough for a decent one. I guess I have my money’s worth. “You’ve put a lot into it, though,” she said. Well… not really. Tires and tubes, of course. I had to buy a new brake lever/shifter set – but I found that on clearance and paid less than fifty dollars for it. I need to buy a new chain – but those are cheap – the thing has been slipping cogs if I push too hard and I think the chain is worn.
The bike is a hunk of crap – but I’ll take it apart, clean and lube it… one more time.
I rode around the Spring Creek woods, taking it easy. I’d stop every now and then at a place with a bench and read a story on my Kindle. Sometimes I’d check the baseball scores on my phone. That’s a nice way to waste a day.
After hanging out in the dappled sunlight of the woods for awhile, I thought about how nice it would be to have other people do this. We could ride along the central trail along 75 to Eastside and grab a burger, maybe a cold beer, then ride back. Never happen, but I rode the route anyway, just to see if it was doable. A nice little ride, actually. It’s a shock to leave the deep, muffled forest and be suddenly along a screaming eight-lane highway, though the trail makes the ride easy. I didn’t get anything to eat, but sat on a bench at Eastside for a bit, watched the folks come and go before cruising back down into the woods.
I first saw Simon and Garfunkel in an interview on television – maybe 1965…. At that time they were portrayed as a pair of oddball singers as part of a documentary on the resurgence of American Folk Music. I didn’t fully understand what I was hearing (I would have been eight years old and knew nothing about music) but my instincts told me that it was something special. This was years before “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and a year before “The Graduate” – the duo had not entered the public consciousness yet. Of course, I don’t remember any details but the documentary seemed to feel that the future belonged to these two strange men.
Five years later I remember riding in the car with my father one dark evening in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas (I even remember the stretch of road) when the DJ announced a brand new release by Simon and Garfunkel – and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” came on the crackly AM mono radio for the first time. It was mesmerizing – I had simply never heard anything like that before. In this age of autotuned over-exposed pneumatic digital teeny-bopper corporate shovel-ready cash cow starlets we easily can forget how music was made to move your soul.
I bought the album and listened to it over and over until the vinyl was worn flat and I had to tape pennies to the tone arm to keep it from skipping.
I was especially obsessed with the non-hit music – all of it. “Frank Lloyd Wright,” “Cecilia,” “Keep the Customer Satisfied.” I was also fascinated by “The Boxer.” I studied the lyrics of that song – how the rhythm changes subtly – how the phrases speed up and slow down building to the heartbreaking climax. It was a small piece of amazing writing (but everybody already knows that).
Now, this was the third Thursday that I rode the train downtown after work for the Patio Sessions of free music in the Dallas Arts District. I was excited because this was going to be Holt and Stockslager in a duo tribute to Simon and Garfunkel.
Chris Holt and Chad Stockslager performing their tribute to Simon and Garfunkel
The music was fantastic – actually it was better than fantastic – it was perfect. It sounded like Simon and Garfunkel would if they could play a small, live, simple, intimate, outdoor set. The played all the favorites and a handful of obscure songs. I loved it, simple as that.
My one complaint, as it was last week, was the kids. It was worse this time around. Right from the beginning – a large horde of squealing children – from toddlers to pre-teens – ran boiling back and forth across the reflecting pool directly in front of the musicians.
This went on for the entire two hours of the performance. The parents did nothing to stop this. In fact, one idiot father in a Ranger’s cap ran out and actually dropped a small soccer ball into the roiling clot and then produced a portable plastic bubble machine to excite the rug rats even more.
I tried to ignore the kids and concentrate on enjoying the music but it was impossible. They were right there, kicking their feet noisily across the water, splashing through the shallow film, screaming at each other and running back and forth in front of the singers at top speed.
I would look (glare) at their parents – most of whom were sitting on blankets in groups well back from the water. They were sipping wine and chatting, ignoring the music completely. When they would turn their heads and look at their spawn running around their smiles would beam beatifically and you could read their minds leaking out of their mouths, “OH, look how cute my child is – I am surely the best parent with the best kid in the world! How lucky I am and how great for all these other people to be able to see and enjoy my wonderful creation… my offspring!”
And that’s it. This event isn’t about the music – it isn’t about Simon and Garfunkel. It’s about them.
My kids were as wild as they come – wilder than these hellions. I thought back – would I have let them run around during the concert?
Absolutely not. I would have let them careen around the reflecting pool before the music started and probably allowed them back between sets – but never while the band was playing.
It’s not about discipline or about how to raise your kids. It’s about respect for other people. Just because you’ve squeezed out a pup or two doesn’t make you the king of the world and a mellow concert is not the same thing as a children’s water park.
In a few weeks they are going to have a string quartet play down at a Patio Session. I would love to go to that – to hear them play. It would be the perfect relaxation after another tough week. But I can’t imagine listening to that subtle music with all those damn kids running around the whole time.
I am just a poor boy Though my story’s seldom told I have squandered my resistance For a pocket full of mumbles such are promises
All lies and jests Still a man hears what he wants to hear And disregards the rest
When I left my home and my family I was no more than a boy In the company of strangers In the quiet of the railway station running scared Laying low, seeking out the poorer quarters Where the ragged people go Looking for the places only they would know
Asking only workman’s wages I come looking for a job But I get no offers, Just a come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there
Then I’m laying out my winter clothes And wishing I was gone Going home Where the New York City winters aren’t bleeding me Bleeding me, going home
In the clearing stands a boxer And a fighter by his trade And he carries the reminders Of ev’ry glove that layed him down Or cut him till he cried out In his anger and his shame
“I am leaving, I am leaving” But the fighter still remains
Bill Chance 