Good morning, Justin,
To bring DAR back to its more relaxed state, I want to tell you what a wonderful day we had yesterday. Dan and I took off for Archer City, home of All Booked Up, Larry McMurtry's store that Carranza2 has mentioned a couple of times.
We entered a different world for the day. Archer City was the town where The Last Picture Show and Texasville were filmed. The population is under 2000. It was flat, dry, and very hot-- the reading on one of those outside thermometers said 105 when we arrived-- and the streets were empty. We felt like characters in Stephen King's Langoliers when we walked down the street, which was as barren and drab as any I'd ever seen.
There were four separate book buildings within a 2 block radius and you wander around the four until you want to leave, when you have to go back to #1, where the only check-out is. No one watches you or worries about your walking off with the books. Each building is packed with books, floor to ceiling and the airconditioning ranges from little to none. The books are mostly hardback, and there are lots of collector's editions apparently, because the prices were fairly high and we didn;t buy many. Each book is marked by McMurtry himself, according to a woman who worked there, and the prices did seem sort of whimisical. But it was a booklover's paradise, no question. There is a whole room of nothing but galleys, the pre-publishing copies that reviewers and stores get, and I even found an unedited copy of Aunt Helen's ...ANd Ladies of the Club!
All I bought was a book of Muriel Rukeyser poetry. Dan got some history books.
ON our way home we detoured to see Antelope, Texas. There was a church (Antelope Baptist) and one empty crossroads, creatively named Post Office Road and I think School Road.
POpulation 60.
Down the road a bit, we veered off to Squaw Mountain, Texas, the name of which will no doubt have to be changed if the PC crowd gets wind of it. We never saw a town, or a squaw, or a mountain for that matter, but there was a Squaw Mt. Ranch- I just looked it up and it seems to be a ranch for hunting exotic animals.
I think this man should be hunted and shot. I can't believe people go shooting beautiful animals for the thrill.
bowhunting.net
There was also a church, Squaw Mountain Church of Christ, which no doubt plays Antelope Baptist in softball, but we saw only one live person, a young boy with no shirt riding a horse along the road.
We were going to stop in Jacksboro at Herd's, which one of Dan's employees had once told him had the best hamburgers in the world, and indeed, so the sign promised, though the building itself was discouraging. Worse than that, it was closed, which I think places its ranking in question since this was 6pm on a Sat.
So we grabbed Texas Toast burgers at Sonic and went on to Fort Richardson Park and the most wonderful thing happened! We had pulled into a parking lot to look at these big clumps of cacti that grow all over and I said, "Oh how cute. There's a little painted deer", and Dan said, "Penni, I don;t think it's painted." Sure enough, there were three of them, and they were real and they just stood there watching us. Then a man pulled up in a truck and got out and pulled open a big bag of range food and he let me feed them! ANd they kept coming until there were 9 of them about 20 feet from me. I asked the man if he worked for the park and he laughed and said, no he was a rancher and he just did this because at this time of year, the protein was pretty much leeched out of the grass, and he had a lot of grain on hand so he and his old collie, who was sitting in the truck, come over and feed them.
I said, how many head do you have? (trying to sound like I know rancher talk)
he said, What?
How many cows I said, embarrassed.
6000.
6000!!!!!!!
That's a lot, isn;t it?
He was just the nicest man,too.
This all sounds so trivial, but it was the most peaceful day. We so seldom just take off like that, and everything we did had the feel of an adventure, almost magical. It could have been a foreign country, it was that different. |
