The new Texas frontier (With A/C and a jacuzzi)

BY JOE O'CONNELL
Austin American-Statesman
(July 25, 2002): p4. (872 words)


We're three miles from Enchanted Rock, and on the radio Tish Hinojosa is warbling something about the real West. We turn toward the Crabapple Community Center, and I realize I am a fraud. A Texan by birth maybe, but I do not fit.

An old man is exiting his truck in that wobbly, ponderous way that says: "I'm from here. My grandparents were from here. And I'm in no hurry to get inside." Metal chairs are in rows under a gingham tent on the lawn. Men are guarding the barbecue pits while women huddle off to the side and tell stories. Our car creeps past and they look up for a moment, just enough time for the gaze of curiosity to ripen to resignation. We are not from here.

Down the road we turn onto a gravel road into an Old West tourist town. The Tin Star Ranch is a group of log cabins, an ancient church and a plastic-bottomed pond. We are staying on the end in the Frontier Cabin. A creaky porch with requisite rocking chairs leads inside to a chair made of cow horns and animal hides. In the bedroom, under a poster for Buckskin Bill's Wild West Show is our rustic bedroom and Jacuzzi tub. I turn the air conditioning down to arctic, and my wife Tiffany and I settle in.

This is our latest Hill Country getaway. When Austin, the city of my birth, gets too hectic, we head to the Gastehaus Schmidt reservation service in Fredericksburg, plop down a credit card and take up residence in nature, or a reasonable facsimile of it.

We've spent the day wandering around Fredericksburg, a place we've been coming to for a decade but have begun to talk about it in the past tense. The Admiral Nimitz birthplace on Main Street was our first favorite bed and breakfast, its walls thick with permanence. I picture my wife, then a new source of beauty in my life, sitting cross-legged in the doorway holding a glass of wine and gazing into the courtyard at the light rain drizzling atop an old-fashioned well. Now the house is full of shops.

Fredericksburg's former hospital, which remained open as a doctor's office until recently, is filled with more shops. Cabinets that once held patient charts are stuffed with trinkets. The nurse's window serves up coffee and snacks. Down the street, the Palace Theater logo still promises once-nightly first-run features. We wandered inside, fondly recalling the sticky floors, salty sweet snacks and squeaky seats. Instead, we found an upscale clothing store. The screen is now painted with a Southwestern motif of clouds and mountains. The balcony holds a faux pueblo dwelling reeking of New Mexico.

We stopped at the Main Book Store and flipped through the Texana section. Tiffany, the daughter of German and Czech pioneers of Texas, bought a book about her ancestors. I grabbed "Southwest Stories," a compilation of short fiction by people who all seem to be from somewhere else. Chicago's Sandra Cisneros writes about San Antonio. Kentucky's Barbara Kingsolver opines about the Arizona heat.

Back at the Tin Star Ranch we pull up rocking chairs and read amid the neener-neener-neener of playful birds. Grasshoppers pop over our feet. Across the pecan bottom, authentic longhorns moan as if asking wwwhhhyyy? Why are you here?

Silly cattle, I'm here because I'm a Central Texas city boy like my father before me, like his father who transplanted his Irish clan from Chicago. Like my mother's wild Louisiana brood who crossed the border seeking something lost to time. Not long roots like Tiffany's, but they're growing every day amid the cedar, pecan and live oak trees that smell like home.

Near sunset, the summer heat melts into dusk. We walk the fence line toward a pair of beige horses. They turn away from us and nibble at the unseasonably ample grass this damp summer. Two semi-tame deer look at us curiously (Why are you here?). I hold a tiny crab-apple in my palm, and the braver deer sniffs my fingers for a moment before turning away.

As the sky fades to fingerpaintings of pink and purple, we stroll toward the faded wooden church. A hand-painted sign on the gate says SALOON and points into an empty field. The ads in town touted live music and an exact replica of the Alamo. We never find them, but glimpse the skeleton of new structures high on a hilltop.

Darkness drops like a knife and we take refuge in the Frontier Cabin. We stick frozen dinners into the microwave oven, pop the cork on a bottle of Fall Creek Mountain Blush and surf the satellite TV offerings before settling for the ironic synchronicity of "Frontier House," PBS's reality program that simulates life in 19th-century Montana.

After a comfortable sleep atop Ralph Lauren linens, we pop the tops on tiny bottles of Dr Pepper (real sugar; none of that modern-day corn syrup for us true Texans) and dine on German pastries purchased yesterday in town. Cows dot the tree-covered hillside. A light rain commences. We rock in our chairs and drift. This is Texas. This, my friends, is why we are all here.