Tag Archives: Texas

McKamy Spring

Posted on by Bill Chance

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 Bit of Dappled Shade

Posted on by Bill Chance

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.

Meat Pie!

Posted on by Bill Chance

As I was puttering around the house Saturday, trying to shake off the ache of a sleepless night, I thought about getting some cereal or something in my gullet – but I realized there would be food trucks at the Ciclovia de Dallas and that I would want to eat there. That made for some hungry driving around, but I was rewarded as I cycled across the closed-off Houston Street Viaduct by the appearance of a gourmet food truck that I had never tried before.

It was the Three Lions truck and this one boasted English Food. A while back I tried the excellent Three Men and a Taco truck and it was good. The problem is that the folks behind this truck were British ex-pats and driving another Taco truck around North Texas didn’t fit in with their souls. So the gaudy Taco wrap came off and the truck became Three Lions.

Most of the Ciclovia festivities were over before I arrived. When I rode my bike up to the truck they were working on the menu sign, crossing off the Sausage Roll. Looking at what was left, I decided on the Meat Pie (The Carolina BBQ Pork Mini Burger looked good, but didn’t sound very English to me). While I was waiting for my food a guy came up to grab a napkin and told me, “Oh man, those sausage rolls are great… Oh crap! They are out of them!” He looked at me like a poor relative as they handed me my meat pie.

I moved to the condiment section and chose the bottle of Sriracha (anything good is better with Sriracha on it). A Hispanic family was standing there eating the last of the sausage rolls and the man pointed to the Sriracha and in broken English said, “That stuff is good… spicy!” I agreed and gave it another squirt.

I carried my pie back to where my bike leaned up against the concrete bridge rail. I sat there eating, listening to the live music, and watching the bikes of the Ciclovia de Dallas roll by. It was good, though I was so hungry I can’t really give a fair review.

Some day, though, I’m going to try that sausage roll.

Three Lions Food Truck Home Page

Three Lions Facebook

Three Lions Twitter

Three Lions food truck at the Ciclovia de Dallas

Texas in our hearts, England in our blood.

A meat pie, Sriracha sauce, a diet Coke, a bike, and a concrete bridge

A Little Bike Ride

Posted on by Bill Chance
Pack

My old bike. I bought it for sixty bucks at a pawn shop over fifteen years ago.

I’m finally feeling back to my normal mediocre self and Texas is having its handful of decent weather days so I’d like to get some bike riding in. It’s tough during the week because I’m so tired when I get home from work that, even though I might have a few minutes of sunlight, all I can think of is to fall into bed and decompress, even if I don’t fall completely asleep.

Well, in this modern age, you have to try and do double duty in everything. There is no time left – it feels as if it has all been used up. Not only do you have to be doing something all the time, you have to be doing two things if you don’t want to fall further behind. In that spirit, we were out of milk. So I decided to ride my bicycle to the Target Superstore and buy a gallon plus a few other sundries that we were in need of.

That’s doing double duty. Shopping and exercise. It isn’t very far – about a mile, plus no real traffic – I can ride the new trail down to the park and then cut over on a little-used feeder road. Then across the back mall parking lot. Our neighborhood strip of big boxes sits where a big ‘ol traditional mall used to squat. For years it was declining, used more as a foul-weather walking route for elderly folks than as a place to fleece excited shoppers. At any rate, they bulldozed it, leaving the anchor tenants on the end and filling in with a row of familiar warehouse-style establishments. The food court was replaced by a line of fast-food slinging eateries strung along the main road like a string of pearls before swing.

But behind this capitalist extravaganza the huge old mall back parking lot remains empty and immense, used only to give motorcycle lessons on weekend mornings – two-wheeled newbies slowly winding between long groupings of red plastic cones. Today, though, it was deserted except for some guy out in the middle changing his oil, an occasional truck coming in to pull and replace a smelly dumpster, and one pair of isolated cars – probably teenagers hooking up. It’s easy for me to cross this vast desert of asphalt – the only thing to look out for are a few drainage grates with long, wheel grabbing slots, always facing the wrong way – parallel to the direction I’m riding.

There is nothing as stupid looking and pitiful as an old fat man riding a bicycle. I feel so idiotic and silly, but I have had a lifetime of experience ignoring my ridiculousness, so I pedal on.

I had a surprisingly difficult time getting there. It’s a bit of an uphill slog coming up from the creek and then, crossing the lot, I ran into a strong headwind. Off to the west was a black roll of approaching storm cloud and the humid south wind was spinning into the complex, feeding the tempest. Still, I caught my breath, downshifted a cog, and kept on going.

Locking my bike and backpack to a steel bench out in front (the nice thing about having a fifteen year old piece of crap bike is that I don’t need the highest security lock) I went in to get my gallon of milk and other stuff. I noticed that once I stopped pedaling and started walking around the cool store, my shirt became spotted in sweat. I looked extra stupid amongst other, car borne shoppers. The Next time, wear a dark t-shirt – mental note.

So I stuffed my gallon of milk into the backpack (it fit easier than I expected) and headed home. I guess I underestimated the wind, because I was able to get almost all the way back without even turning a pedal – propelled by the brisk breeze at my back.

Buoyed by my success, I made a list of close in destinations I could ride my bike to. Along this route, there is the big box variety/grocery store, two hardware stores, a couple of Pho places, tons of fast food, an office supply store, and a haircut place. The other way is the big Vietnamese shopping center – and I can get there without leaving the trail. If I want to go a little farther, I can cut through an industrial area and get to the DART rail station, library, and a whole complex of diverse ethic eateries.

Jeez – if the weather was nicer for more of the year I could get rid of the car.

I’m still pretty stupid looking, though.

Dallas Snuggie Pub Crawl

Posted on by Bill Chance

A while back (Saturday February 4th to be exact) I was waiting to get on the McKinney Avenue Trolley down by the Dallas Museum of Art. Glancing over at the folks waiting in line to board, I noticed that some of them were wearing odd items of clothing – at a glance, at a distance, at first… they seemed to be some sort of colorful flowing robe. My first idea was that they had come from the Crow Museum of Asian Art (which was having some festivities that day) and were wearing some cheap imitation Asian costume of some kind.

Riding down McKinney Avenue in the Trolley, I started to notice other folks wearing these robes. Now, though I could see them a bit better and realized what they were. These people were wearing Snuggies.

A whole group of Women of a Certain Age clambered aboard wearing matching tiger-striped Snuggies, cateye sunglasses, and silver tiaras (sorry, I was so gobsmacked by the whole entourage I forgot to bring out my camera). I asked them what was up and they said it was the third annual Dallas Snuggie Pub Crawl.

All along the route I saw folks all snuggified – though a lot were cheating – they were simply wearing their bathrobes backward. I know this is alright… the rules say:

This is a Snuggie Pub Crawl even so a Snuggie of some kind is REQUIRED but you can also wear:

  • Slankets
  • Designer Snuggies
  • Snuggie knock-off brands
  • Adult Onesie or Forever Lazy
  • Robes

I’m sorry, but I think these rules are too lax… I don’t think robes or Forever Lazy should count. I go out in those all the time.

We chugged along through Uptown and began to pass the bars where the pub crawlers were congregating. It looked like a blast. It was tough to get decent photographs – the trolley was packed and moving fast and I had to shoot through bits of glass.

So, I assume there will be a fourth annual Dallas Snuggie Pub Crawl in or around February next year. I’ve made a note in my planner – it’s the only thing I have marked for 2013 so far.

I’ll have to buy a Snuggie, though. I am not going to go out there in a backwards robe.

The Snuggie People boarding the trolley

OK, this is Texas, so I guess the burnt orange Snuggies are all right, but what is that big green case he is lugging and why does she have such an armload of notes for a pub crawl?

When you and your insignificant other meet another couple in Uptown for drinks... is it more embarrassing to forget your Snuggies... or to remember them?

The bars were hoppin'. Are those Mandelbrot set Snuggies?

http://vimeo.com/14197881

D Magazine Photographs from this year’s Snuggie Pub Crawl

Snuggie Pub Crawl in Uptown

Pegasus News, First Pub Crawl Photos

2010 Pub Crawl Photos

2011 Pub Crawl Photos

Skull & Crossbones Snuggie

Ode to My Snuggie

I Sing the Body Snuggified

Shit Dallas People Say

Posted on by Bill Chance

If you don’t live here this won’t make sense. Now, if you’ve been reading my blog you might recognize a few things, but otherwise, nah.

But if you are from Dallas, this is hilarious.

I loved it, even though it didn’t have my favorite Dallas saying. That’s, “Well, you start out driving on Beltline.”  Everything (including my house) is right off Beltline Road. I can be on a freeway fifty miles from my house and see a Beltline Exit sign. One weekend I’m going to drive the entire Beltline Road (it is a loop, surprise) – it might take two days.

Others that I hear(or say) that aren’t on the video:

  • “I get nosebleeds if I go north of George Bush.”
  • “I remember when the West End was cool.”
  • “Nobody rides DART to the fair, it’s too crowded.”
  • “Ugh, the water tastes awful, the lakes must have turned over.”
  • “Should we take LBJ or George Bush.”
  • “Should we go Woodall Rogers or the Mixmaster?”
  • “Central’s all red, better take Greenville.”
  • “There a wreck on 75, better take Coit.”
  • “Stay away from 30, the Zipper is busted.”
  • “I had to bail her out of Lou Sterrett”
  • I don’t remember if it’s in Rockwall or Rowlett.”
  • “Pho Pasteur has the best Pho.”
  • “Bistro B has the best Pho.”
  • “Pho Bac has the best Pho.”
  • “Pho Bang has the best Pho.”
  • “Pho Q  has the best Pho.”
  • “Pho King has the best Pho.”
  • “He lives in this old house, it’s been there almost twenty years.”
  • “They live in a Condo in Uptown.”
  • “Who lives in all these houses?”
  • “Let me borrow your DART pass.”
  • “Let me borrow your Toll Tag.”
  • “You can’t get to Deep Ellum from here.”
  • “Are we waiting for the Red or the Blue?”
  • “Whatever you do, don’t jaywalk in downtown”
  • “A coyote got their cat.”
  • “Back when Frisco was way out in the country.”
  • “Back when Southwest had free drinks.”
  • “I can’t believe you walked there.”
  • “Is the AC all the way up?”
  • “They need to hurry the hell up, they’re driving the speed limit.”
  • “That Mexican food place looks awful, their food must be great.”

At any rate, here it is:

What Dallas sayings do you have that you treasure/are completely sick of? What sayings do you hear every day where you are at?

La Desperada

Posted on by Bill Chance

A few weeks ago I read a book that I ordinarily would not have read. This isn’t surprising, I’m not the target audience for this genre of fiction. I volunteered to read and review the new book by the teacher of a fiction class I took a few years ago, Patricia (Pooks) Burroughs. It’s a historical romance novel called La Desperada.

I didn’t want to put this up until the book was available – you can buy the ebook here. Go ahead, get it… you know you want to. I guarantee that this is the sort of thing you will like if you like this sort of thing.

This is the second romance novel I’ve read. The first was a random thin paperback Harlequin I picked up maybe thirty years ago and read out of sheer curiosity. Don’t ask the title, it’s long lost in my memory, along with the plot, characters, theme… or anything at all about the book except my visceral reaction to it. I remember that I read it in a couple of hours, although I’m not a particularly fast reader. I was able to crank through it so quickly because, First – I had the feeling I knew what the next sentence, paragraph, scene, chapter, all of it – was going to be. And I was always right. Second, I could read it fast because there was nothing there.

I did not become a fan of the genre after that first taste.

So now I am faced with La Desperada and writing a review of a book in a genre that I simply don’t read. Luckily, La Desperada is a much, much better book that that old Harlequin. It is a Romance, but there is much more going on between the pages, and it is written with a lot more ambition, excitement, and skill.

I went to school in Lawrence, Kansas. On days when the weather was nice, I used to walk from my dorm across Iowa Street into an ancient cemetery for a nice quiet place to sit outside and study. Sometimes I would even lean against an old tombstone with a textbook in my lap. Over time, I read most of the stones – they were all victims of Quantrill’s raid – where in a prelude to the civil war a band of Missouri based outlaws came across and burned Lawrence, slaughtering a good many of the residents.

I’m familiar with the history and passion of those days of violence and banditry and was glad to read that the prologue of La Desperada was set in Clay County, Missouri and that the heart of the conflict was born from the evil that spread across the land in those days.

Then the real story begins in West Texas – the town of Cavendish in 1881. Civilization had a tenuous hold on that wild land. There was still a place for men like Clayton Dougherty – men representing the law though they were at best barely on the right side of it – and too often, on the wrong. The uneasy, unstable, and ultimately cataclysmic triangle of Clayton, his intelligent and virtuous but scarred brother Joel, and Joel’s wife Elizabeth is thrown into violence and death when an outlaw, Boone Coulter shows up.

Once the story gets going, Boone and Elizabeth are on the run together, trying to escape their doom fleeing through the rugged desert and mountains of far West Texas and the untamed frontier towns of New Mexico.

I’ve driven North from Van Horn, Texas, along the valley east of the Sierra Diablo and felt the silent menace of those ragged cliffs and heat blasted salt flats. It looks wild and dangerous, and is so, even from a minivan. I’ve hiked up McKittrick Canyon in the Guadalupe Mountains (which must be the location of Boone’s hidden cabin hideout) and seen the magical beauty that a little water and shade can create in the high desert. My favorite aspect of La Desperada is the effort, imagination, and attention to detail that Patricia injects into the romance to pay homage to the setting and the landscape. West Texas, for good and bad, becomes another character in the story, and that is a very good thing.

That is the skill and effort that elevates the story above the run-of-the-mill romance. There is a real story here, real danger, real complexity. The romantic storyline is intact and moves as expected, but beyond that there is plenty of meat to sink your teeth into.

My only complaint with the book was the sex scenes. They arrive periodically and predictably and I found myself simply skipping these sections. This is not due to any prudishness on my part – I’m up for a little titillation without any qualms. I simply found the sex scenes in La Desperada clichéd and, I’m afraid, simply unexciting. I don’t know if that is a requirement of the genre (Bodice Ripping in the Old West) or not. At any rate, jumping over a page now and then didn’t damage the story at all – so it was all good.

When you are writing about someone else’s work, it is usually a bad idea to opine about what you would like to see done differently. You should write about what the book is, not what it is not. In this case, however, I want to give my opinion; I can’t resist. There is a secondary character that works to move the story forward – he has a doomed relationship with the the outlaw’s sister – his name is Miguél Obregón. I found this flawed, dangerous, evil, yet honorable in his own way character to be the most interesting thing in the book. I would love to read a book written about the love story between him and the sister from his point of view.

That would be something.

Links:

Sample Chapter

Review from Book Babe

Review from Journey of a Bookseller

Fresh Fiction

Babe’s Chicken Dinner House

Posted on by Bill Chance

On Sunday we met some friends for a late lunch and to exchange holiday gifts. They live on the opposite side of the Metroplex, so Candy chose a casual restaurant about halfway in between.

She decided on Babe’s Chicken Dinner House in Carrollton. There are Babe’s restaurants all over the place. One is only a couple miles from our house, in Garland. I first ate there in August of 2000 and wrote about it in my online journal.

Here’s what I had to say back then:

Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign something is eating us.

—-Peter De Vries

Today, Candy took Nick out for his birthday dinner, a day late. Lee didn’t want to go and headed over to a friend’s house, Nicholas (of course) didn’t mind.

Candy called me at work when they left home and I drove to meet them. The place isn’t far from my work. It is Nicholas’ favorite restaurant.

It is called Babe’s Chicken Dinner House. It could be a joke, a satire on everything Texan – except it is serious.

The place is located in a run-down strip center in northern Garland. It shares the NorthStar Center with the Mu Do Martial Arts Academy, the Celebration Bible Church, Second Look Beauty Supply, the Begin Again Thrift Store, a handful of vacant storefronts, and three different burger joints.

I arrived before Nick and Candy so I sat awhile outside, enjoying the sultry evening with the day’s heat reradiating off the partially melted asphalt in the parking lot. They have a row of chairs out front, some made from old steel tractor seats crudely welded to triangles of rebar. A cable runs through them all to discourage theft. A surprisingly powerful outdoor speaker blared out Elvis (Kentucky Rain) and Willie Nelson (an odd version of Deep in the Heart of Texas).

I didn’t have to wait long before Candy and Nick arrived and we went in and ordered. The menu is simple: Fried Chicken, Chicken Fried Steak, Pork Ribs, Pot Roast, Fried Catfish. You get a huge serving of meat and unlimited sides. They keep bringing and bringing, tray after tray. Massive bowls of mashed potatoes, biscuits, heavy cream gravy, creamed corn, stewed tomatoes and okra, green beans, that sort of thing.

“Want anything else with that honey?” our waitress asked, “Tabasco, A-1, Jalepenos?”

“I’ll have a few Jalepenos,” I replied.

The waitresses are young voluptuous local girls in impossibly tight jeans or older battleaxes that look like they’ve been rode hard and put up wet too many times. They all have that tough down-home serious look about them. So do the customers. All stiff, proper, not-too-well-off folk. Mostly families. Everybody looks hungry. One large table was full of burly firefighters, all in blue shirts and burr haircuts. A huge ladder truck and ambulance were parked outside.

The decor is beyond tacky. Lots of wood, mostly concealed with country style bric-a-brac. Hand painted signs everywhere with earthy wit – “Life is too short to drink cheap beer,” “Never squat with your spurs on,” “Work is for people who don’t know how to fish,” “Speak your mind but ride a fast horse,” “Don’t steal the government doesn’t like competition.”

Even more bizarre signs adorn various dead animals stuck on the wall here and there. A stuffed Raccoon is inexplicably labeled, “Just say NO to raccoon.” An armadillo is spray painted gold and boasts, “Roadkill Only.” A swordfish has been painted black and white, spotted like a cow, mounted above a piece of plywood that says, “No sushi.” I guess all this is supposed to improve the appetite.

Nick loves the place. He had the child’s plate – only a chicken leg. He ate the side dishes like a lumberjack, though. Mostly the creamed corn and the biscuits.

In the center of the restaurant is a massive display case filled with huge pies. Lemon, chocolate, coconut cream. The meringue flows across the top like a toasted ocean – tan peaks flicking pointed into the valley far below. I was so stuffed I couldn’t even look at them.

Now I feel sick. There is no way I can go into that place and not eat too much. No way.

Near the exit a small plastic pet carrier sits on a pedestal. “Babe’s Groundhog,” is spray painted on it, along with warning not to feed the groundhog, to keep your fingers away, that sort of thing. On the way out I couldn’t help but look inside. Nestled in a nice little bed of hay is a tube of Owen’s Sausage. Ground-Hog… Get it?

Many things have changed greatly in the almost-a-dozen years since I wrote that. Many things have changed greatly. Babe’s Chicken Dinner House is not one of them. Only a few details around the edges – the crowd is now much more diverse – the Metroplex is more of a worldly Cosmopolitan place now. The menu has added smoked chicken, so it is a little bit healthier.

The restaurant in Carrollton is a bit more upscale than the one in Garland – it’s an interesting architectural hodgepodge built from an old lumber yard and chicken coop with a nice patio that holds a giant firepit sort of place to sit around, watch some wood burn, and choke on the smoke. It is trimmed out in raw cedar posts – which are beautiful and unique. The humor is as tacky, though – on the ceiling over our table was painted a huge blue oval, with duck feet, bottoms, and a few duck heads poking down through the blue. The idea was that we were sitting under a pond and these ducks were swimming around on top of the ceiling, peering down through the water at us. I guess….

One interesting thing about that old journal entry was that it would always get a huge number of search engine hits. I had a good stats server then and I discovered that those searches were all coming from Norman, Oklahoma. Apparently Oklahoma University students loved to eat at Babe’s when they came to the Big D for the Texas-OU game. I guess….

So I had the smoked chicken, but ate too many mashed potatoes – so I ate ’til I was sick. We all sat around the fire pit and talked, until my winter cold congestion revolted against the woodsmoke and I had to beat a hasty retreat into the fresh air so I could breathe.

So I wave goodbye to Babe’s Chicken Dinner House for another year. I feel sure it will be back again next year… as delicious and tacky as ever.

The odd fire pit outside at Babe's Chicken Dinner House in Carrollton, Texas.

Links to other blogs talkin’ bout Babe’s:

Just Me Saying

Donna Cooks

Regular Joe’s Guide

Arlington Insider

Food Network “The Best Thing I Ever Ate”

NewsOK – Here’s those Oklahoma folks again

Dude Food

Southern Living – Where to Eat at the South’s Best Fried Chicken Restaurants

Balmorhea

Posted on by Bill Chance

I recently discovered this band, Balmorhea… Their music is fantastic, it reminds me of Lucovico Einaudi – and they are named after one of my favorite places in West Texas.

When we first visited Balmorhea, it was like the start of this video – we were crossing the blasted desert looking at the red tornados of dust devils. Suddenly, there was a dive shop, and then the incredible pool of San Solomon Springs.

I wrote in July of 2000:

We drove the Interstate to Pecos and then turned south towards the distant blue wiggly line of the Davis Mountains. Watching the mountains grow, we drove through the most isolated and blasted looking territory yet. Nick and Lee were delighted by the enormous dust devils that the sun spawned across the desiccated fields. Looking like brick-red tornadoes these wandered across the flatlands. We drove through one and it was powerful enough to worry me about the trailer pulling behind, but it only gave the van a good shove and didn’t cause any real problems.

It was an easy drive and by mid-afternoon we arrived at Balmorhea. The park there is an oasis in the desert edged up against the foothills of the Davis Mountains. The rain that falls in the highlands percolates down and emerges from an artesian spring, cold and clear. Back in the thirties, the government took the wild spring and built a gigantic Y-shaped concrete swimming pool. The parks boasts the swimming pool, a nice little hotel, a recently constructed desert wetlands – the San Solomon springs Cienega (labor supplied by the Texas Department of Corrections) that provides habitat for two endangered species of tiny fish( the Comanche Springs Pupfish and the Pecos Gambusa), and a loop of nice little campsites each with its own quaint little fake-adobe shelter.

A quick sketch I made of the Balmorhea campsite.

Nick at Balmorhea, in July of 2000

Nick jumps off at Balmorhea, eleven years ago.

I had one of the most frightening experiences of my life the next day at that pool in Balmorhea.

From my journal, July 3, 2000:

We came back down to Balmorhea in the late afternoon and decided to go swimming. We talked to Lee about his fear of the fish in the pool and, as I suspected, it was mostly that he was tired and hungry yesterday. Some rest and some food and he was ready to hit the water.

He didn’t really do any swimming. What he preferred to do was to put on his goggles and stretch across his inflatable inner tube and let me swim and pull the tube around the big pool. He’d take a deep breath and stick his head into the water and look at the bottom. The pool is very large and there was a lot to look at. He would have requests like, “Swim me over to that end,” or “let’s go out to the deep part,” and I’d oblige. He’d plunge his face and come up with a report of what he saw: a school of fish, or some rocks, or a turtle, or a place where some kids had inscribed their names into the algae growing on the bottom.

After the crowded holiday that day before, only a handful of swimmers and some scuba divers were there. As I pulled Lee around Nick dove off the high board and swam until it was his turn. Lee wrapped in a towel and walked back to the campsite. Nicholas put on his goggles and I started swimming him around on his tube. We went into the deep end to try and spot the place where the copious flow of water erupted in a bed of white bubbling sand.

We came up against the stairs on the far side. I was getting tired and cold, the spring water is very chilly, it was late, I’d been swimming a long time and it was taking its toll. I asked Nick if we should walk back, around the pool or swim across. We did have his inner tube – I felt confident we could make it across one more time. We decided to swim. It was a mistake.

Nick looped his goggles around one shoulder and took hold of one side of the tube while I grabbed the other and we started to swim. Not too far from the side, but at the deepest part, maybe thirty feet deep, Nick called out, “Oh, oh, there go my goggles.” In retrospect I should have let them sink; but I took a big gulp of air and took off underwater, diving as deep and as quickly as I could. Maybe twenty feet down I saw a sinking orange blur, frog-kicked over to the goggles and grabbed them. Then I swam back up to the surface.

When you start reaching well into your forties, like I am, there is a fundamental change in the relationship between you and your body. What has been a good friend over the years, a partner, something you are… well, attached to – suddenly turns traitor. Abilities you have taken for granted for decades disappear. No one tells you about this. As a youth I could swim underwater with the ease and comfort of walking across a field. I took this for granted, the ability to hold my breath, come up for air and refresh myself. I discovered tired, and cold, and old, and fat… this is no longer true.

When I came up and handed Nicholas his goggles and put one hand on the inner tube and started kicking and swimming I realized that I was not going to be able to catch my breath. It came on with awful speed. No matter how hard I tried, my breathing became more and more labored, shallower, moving my arms and legs in the cold spring water was becoming extremely difficult.

It was horrifying.

With amazing clarity of thought, I knew I was not going to drown. I did have that inner tube for a float, even though I was rapidly becoming so weak I could barely hold on to it. There were some scuba divers in the pool that had finished diving and were sitting on the steps talking over the day’s sights and I knew I could call to them and they would haul me out of the pool. I came within a hair’s breadth of doing that.

The main fear I had was I thought I might be having a heart attack. I had never felt like this before. There was no pain, but I simply could not breathe, I could not get enough oxygen into my body to keep my arms and legs moving.

I don’t know what Nicholas thought, holding on to the other side of the inner tube, my son’s face only a few inches from mine. I must have scared him a little because I know I was flopping more than I should, trying to hook my arm into the tube and was unable to get it done. I didn’t want to frighten him unnecessarily so I kept my rising fears to myself.

Slowly, we continued to move across the wide pool, and finally I was able to reach down with a toe and touch the bottom. That didn’t help as much as you’d think because I was too weak to stand in the water and the energy used to hop and get my face above water made my breathing more impossible. Finally, the floor became shallower and shallower and before I knew it I was on the steps.

I released the tube and the brisk wind blew it away. “Could somebody get that please,” I asked, and a scuba diver caught it with a couple strong sure strokes and brought it back to me.

I didn’t have to sit beside the pool for very long before I felt fine. The fear and panic quickly drained away and left me with a slight elation even though I was still a little tired. I told Nicholas to take his towel and walk back to the popup at the campsite, I’d catch up in a minute.

Looking back on it now, I realize what I was feeling, in addition to simple exhaustion, was hypothermia. The spring water was cold and I had been in it for hours. There had been no pain, but I had felt a thin sliver away from death.

Walking slowly back to the camp, enjoying the last purple glow of the set sun, following the channels that the water followed as it coursed out of the pool, roaring down the irrigation ditches on out of the park, I felt fine. But the memory of those minutes of fear, the feeling of helplessness and drowning, are still with me. I had never felt like that before and I don’t look forward to feeling like that again.

Shooting in the Galleries

Posted on by Bill Chance

I decided to go downtown on Saturday for the first day of the Arts District’s Art in October celebration. The night before, I struggled to get to sleep, and didn’t get up as early as I wanted – but soldiered on anyway.

When I arrived at the DART station and was buying my ticket at the kiosk I looked up to see my train go by. They are scheduled every twenty minutes on weekends so I knew I would have to wait a while. No problem, it was a beautiful day and I settled down on a little seat on the deserted train platform and started to read my Kindle application on my Blackberry.

The Richardson Library now has Kindle books available for loan. I haven’t mastered the method yet, but I had managed to get a book of Billy Collins‘ poetry (“Ballistics”) to appear on the tiny screen – so that is good.

At a break between poems, I looked down and noticed a laptop bag right beside me, leaning up against my little seat. I looked around, nobody… so I unzipped the bag a bit and peered inside. There was a top-end laptop with accessories, including a really nice USB camera, folders of papers, and a VISA card stuck into a side pocket. I zipped it back up and sat there, trying to think of what to do.

A train going the other way pulled into the station and the doors opened wide right in front of me. I expected some panicked commuter to tumble out and yell, “Thank God it’s still here!” and grab his laptop case. It would be easy to get on the train and leave your case behind, but surely you would realize it was missing by the next stop. It would be easy to hop off and grab the next train back the other way.

Nothing.

I sat there for a second and stared at the gaping door in the train. I would love to have a nice high-end laptop like the one in the bag – among physical possessions that is the only thing I can really think of (now that I have my camera back). It would be so easy to simply stand up with the bag and get on that train. The platform was still empty.

I could actually see myself doing this – lifting the case and entering the train with a sigh, as if I was having to go to work on a Saturday. It would be the perfect crime.

A lot of people… maybe even most people (but not you, dear reader, surely) would not even consider this stealing. They would consider it a “found” laptop and they simply lucky. I wonder about people like that. What does the world look like to them? I guess they think of all the stuff that has been stolen from them and that the world owes them one now and then. I guess they have a piece of their head missing, the one that imagines the pain and suffering of someone else that has lost their valuables – in the case of a personal laptop, lost a big chunk of their life. Morality aside, a laptop case like that – with all the critical data in it – is a lot more valuable to the person losing it than to the person stealing it.

The train doors closed and it sped off.

Now what to do? My train would be there soon and I would have to make a decision. Obviously, until my train came, all I had to do was sit next to the case. Any thief would assume it was mine, only the owner would walk up and claim it. But my train would be the next one – nobody will arrive before then. Should I look in the case again, try to find a cellphone number? Should I take it with me and hope to locate the owner later? The easy thing to do would be to simply leave it where it sat and be done with it – but isn’t that about the same as stealing? I wouldn’t get to keep it but I would be abandoning it to a heartless and uncertain world – it would surely end in grief and while I would not be directly responsible and would not be aware of its fate, by inaction I would set the wheels in motion.

Luckily, I didn’t have to make the choice. I looked up and a Hispanic woman and a DART ticket official were walking up from the tunnel (the Arapaho train station is separated from the rest of the world by a wide, busy street – you have to go under it in a long pedestrian tunnel to reach the platform). The official asked me if the case was mine. She began to carefully probe the case, weary of terrorism (something that had not occurred to me until then). I didn’t mention that I had already opened it up. She moved the zipper and inch and saw the laptop within.

The woman that had made the report said the case had been there for a while, “At least five trains,” she said. She and I talked about how odd it was that nobody came back for the case. The official was making a report on her radio. I asked her if there was a lost-and-found and she said, “Yes, but I’m not allowed to do anything, I have to call for the transit police to pick it up.”

At that moment my train pulled up and I was gone.

On the train I went back to reading the Billy Collins poems on my Blackberry. The poems are short and I could pretty much digest one between each train stop.

One of them, “August in Paris” in typical Collins style, spoke of the poet watching a painter in France and standing behind the painter, taking notes, while he worked. He then made the jump to the reader, and how this readers can’t watch him work but he thinks about who they are.

He says, “there is only the sound of your breathing/and every so often, the turning of a page.”

I thought about this… how times had changed. There isn’t the sound of my breathing, but the clacking rails and the tumult of a crowded commuter train cabin. There is no turning of pages… only the silent movement of my thumb across the tiny black Blackberry trackpad and a new dinky screenfull of luminescent text appears.

Dining area at the Dallas Museum of Art. Glass by Dale Chihuly.

Nasher – Tony Cragg

Everyone is taking pictures, not everyone likes it.

The one person not taking photographs was sketching

At the Nasher

Ceiling of the Nasher

One of my favorite Bang Bang videos will not allow imbedding.

Shame.

Watch it on Youtube.