The 1980s got worse and better at the same time. While I explored Texas unsuspecting of the repetitive, vicious nature of my disease, I found a winning combination in female companionship. Some of it was romance.
Mind you, I was in my 40s. The decades before didn't compare, nor have they compared since.
It was a golden dawn, chocolate on chocolate, diamonds forever.
More often than not, the women were in the Unitarian Church and the Sierra Club, both liberal organizations, both of which contained beliefs that embodied common sense, to borrow from conservatives. Jesus was the son of God as we are all the sons of God. Women and men are equal and play on the same field. The natural world is our sacred trust. Ultimately, I think we saw the environment and God as one.
We dated vigorously. And although the church's minister spoke against sexual freedom, many of these women, and men, exercised it, it being in the days before AIDS made the front pages. It became my last liberation from teen years without parental sex education, that duty passed along to the church. And the church corrupted the meaning of adultery. All sex outside of marriage did not break the Ten Commandments.
Joy.
My companion protested that her friends were spending the summer in Colorado while she vacationed in humid East Texas. I quieted her with a ride on a bicycle built for two in Jefferson, Texas, along with the pursuit of other treasures of a grand scavenger hunt in the region.
The hunt was made possible by two books, The Best of East Texas and The Best of East Texas II, written by Bob Bowman. Although his imprecise directions could be aggravating, they turned a driving tour into a game on a broad scale.
The treasures were both winners and losers, something akin to those discovered in adventure games played on computers. One of the first and easiest discoveries was the East Texas Oil Museum in Kilgore, Texas. The museum's innovative "muddy" boom-town street provided fun insight into what became in the 1930s the largest oil field in the world. The museum was a tribute to Dallas tycoon H. L. Hunt, who made his fortune in the field, and to J. M. "Dad" Joiner, who persevered to drill the discovery well. That well, the Daisy Bradford No. 3, was still pumping.
Country Tavern near Kilgore was the Marfreless watering hole of East Texas. As at the Houston establishment, no sign told what was behind the doors. The secret was truly the best barbecued ribs around. As the guide said, the dark but respectable Gregg County honky-tonk clinged "to the northeast elbow of a highway intersection a few miles west of Kilgore."
Being summer, we headed for the "best swimming hole," called Blue Hole in Angelina County. A turn "less than ten miles out of Zavalla" proved difficult to locate because of the lack of a marker on the U.S. Forest Service road. I don't recall why the directions to cross three wooden bridges and turn right didn't work out, but we ended up stymied by a huge mudhole as did friends who earlier followed the guide. When we finally found the swimming hole, the loud radios of youths on the sandstone cliffs surrounding the two-acre lake forced us to turn the swim into a heads-under-water dunking session.
We could feel we were close to the proverbial treasure chest in Jefferson. We rented bicycles near the Excelsior House, the "best country hotel," and took a leisurely ride through a neighborhood studded with Victorian houses. The Victorian period influenced architecture from 1860 to 1900. One of the best examples from the era in Texas was the House of the Seasons at Jefferson. Athough it retained a Greek Revival floor plan of a columnar front gallery, central hall and balanced rooms, the detail was Victorian. A cupola topped off cornices and round-headed widows. A view of the garden through the cupola's red, green, yellow, and blue glass reminded one of the different seasons. The public could tour the Seasons home and others, including the antebellum Freeman Plantation built in 1850. Slaves worked its 1,000-acre cotton and sugar-cane fields.
"Cotton is where the business was" long after the slaves were gone, said Sam Vaughn, who with his brother Tom owned and operated the T.C. Lindsey & Co. general store at Jonesville, or according to understatement in the guidebook, "a few miles east of Marshall." The store came with a gin.
"The size of a cotton farm (in the first half of the last century) depended on the size of the family," Vaughn said "But the government changed the allotments. A family (that) had a 40-acre cotton allotment and was doing the best they could had it cut to three acres."
The gin processed a record 2,976 bales of coton in 1937. It closed after ginning four bales in 1973.
Cotton had paid the bills for food and supplies of up to 500 families who shopped at the general store, established on the same spot in the mid-1800s. The shelves were still packed with everything from cheese to clothes, and display space held tools such as the Kelly plow (forged in northeast Texas and no longer for sale).
The store on our tour was built in 1922. Sam Vaughn began working there as a bookkeeper in 1928, and bought it ten years later. His brother Tom joined him in 1947. Tom talked of selling out, but he did not wish to chance closing a store special enough to be a part of Disney movies. In a telephone call he got as excited as his brother about the film role of the store, saying the name was changed to Vainer Store when The Long Hot Summer was reshot for television with Jason Robards and Ava Gardner in 1985. The place was more than the "best general store" in East Texas. It was the treasure chest.
 |
| Mariscal Canyon |
 |
| Jim Bones on Photo Tour |
Bones was again my guide this trip. He was appreciative that the woman I shared this outing with could wake up early laughing.
In an afternoon rafting through the canyon we saw goldeneye and bufflehead ducks and yellow-rumped warblers. Leatherstem, a plant used by Indians to stop the flow of blood from wounds, grew in an arroyo. So did a nut-bearing guayacan tree. Beavers had parted Bermuda grass to slide into the river. And man had left his mark on the banks too. A recluse had abandoned icons in a reed hut. Someone else had once operated a wax factory here; its rusty parts remained. Wax makers added the locally abundant candelilla plant to a mixture of water and sulfuric acid to create their product. When the wax floated to the top of the vat, it was scooped off. It went mostly into chewing gum.
The most important consideration when hiking trails beyond the Pecos River boils down to water. People haven't adapted to the desert and abutting country as have two of the most frequently seen creatures on the highways, the roadrunner by day and the jackrabbit by night.
The roadrunner puts the sun to work in energy conservation. It lowers its body temperature in the night chill by as much as seven degrees from a normal 101 degrees. At dawn, the bird suns a patch of back skin by raising its feathers and spreading its wings. The skin acts as a solar panel, increasing the roadrunner's temperature without burning energy. The jackrabbit hops into a depression shaded by a bush and radiates heat skyward from its large ears, thus reducing the use of water by removing body heat. Humans, of course, don't grow big ears, and we don't have lots of feathers. We depend on the evaporation of perspiration to remove excess body heat from exercise and the sun. The water lost through perspiration needs replenishing. You require maintenance of a water level within narrow limits. It is essential for physical and mental efficiency, and ultimately life.
A naturalist advised hikers to drink water even if they aren't thirsty. "Warm temperatures and low humidity can be deceiving," he said. "The reason that 94 degrees at 10 percent humidity feels so comfortable is that perspiration evaporates as quickly as it appears, thus keeping your surface skin temperature cool.. This can result in rapid dehydration in an individual who feels comfortable and thinks that he hasn't even worked up a sweat."
And water out here is scarce. Virtually no streams cross the trails as they do in Colorado or California, where a person can dip a refreshing cup of water almost at will. The situation limits the backpacker. The pack must contain a reservoir, a gallon of water for each person for each day of the trip--a rule of thumb averaging variations in individuals, topography, and climate. A gallon weighs 8.3 pounds. For a three-day trip that adds up to 25 pounds of water for each back. You can see the limitation. The weight makes more than a long weekend uncomfortable and almost unthinkable.
Otherwise, backpacking looks as easy as putting one foot in front of the other repetitiously. Usually, it is. But in my first adversity in the sport, I lost a young woman figuratively--and literally--on a trail in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Worse, she panicked, and we sideswiped disaster.
Later, I would hunt out pages on wilderness survival previously given scant attention in fifteen years of on-and-off backpacking. A surprising number of books about backpacking simply warn against panic. Many ignore the basic procedures that I also ignored which led to trouble. Even the authoritative walker Colin Fletcher admitted to never really giving the matter of survival the thought it seems to deserve.
Fletcher noted that "this kind of 'survival' mostly amounts to 'experience.'" He quoted an adviser on the subject as saying, "What it generally amounts to, anyway, with inexperiened people, is simply not giving in to terror. That's what usually happens: ignorance--then panic ..." My tale of woe illustrates the point. I share it for emphasis and to warn that, as basic as walking is, in rough terrain with a house on your back, there is more to it
The Guadalupe Mountains are, collectively, one of the more rugged places in the state. You can climb to the highest point in Texas, Guadalupe Peak (8,751 feet), and gaze on salt flats a mile below. More of the largest known fossil reef appears here than anywhere else. El Capitan, a 2,000-foot cliff, rises dramatically as you approach the park from the south.
Sara (not her real name) and I averaged 1.3 miles an hour in a late afternoon climb from the car parked at Pine Springs Campground to Pine Top, a primitive campsite up four miles of steep switchbacks. We packed four gallons of water (35 pounds, 4 ounces, including containers) for the 48-hour outing. A two-gallon plastic container of distilled water found at grocery stores fit perfectly in the bottom of a pack. The other water dangled on the outside of both packs in four quart-and-a-half bottles.
My companion had shown commitment to nutrition and readily agreed to draw up the menu. She bagged and labeled each meal. The entrees included lamb curry, sweet and sour pork, and shrimp creole (all freeze dried). In addition, she got ingredients to mix for gorp (a trail snack combining nuts, sunflower seed kernels, raisins, and coconut) and cereal at a health food store. And there was no denying my companion's fitness.
Sara had not backpacked before, only a trial day hike with full pack before the trip. She outdistanced me on the trail the seond day, however, with a drive that approached macho. Thus was born the first mistake. I take it easy, smell the pine-scented air often, and let a less-than-fit body plod along. I ignored rules of the path, which go something like this: Travel at the speed of the slowest, keep each other in sight, plan your route carefully before setting off. But in good weather, on a rocky trail along a dry gully arched with trees, with a bright and physically tough companion, I relaxed the guardian role dictated by my experience. It was not a concious decision, just something felt--the opposite extreme of caution felt with a child. And I lost her. She vanished, and in less than two miles I reached a junction that pointed the way to fear.
We had spoken of having lunch at the Mescalero campsite, mentioned on trail signs, without consulting a map. The junction marker showed it .9 miles in the opposite direction of Bush Mountain, our next campsite. Translated, that's about 1.5 hours out of the way. and that's the first of three reasons I decided my companion didn't head to Mescalero. Almost no one with a pack 25 percent overweight would travel such an extra distance for lunch. Experience on the shakedown hike and planning this one also told me she was adamant against backtracking, and going to Mescalero meant later backtracking to the junction. Finally, she wanted to arrive in camp before dark, by about 4, and that was hardly possible by extending the walk. I headed for Bush Mountain. What was outside of reason for me, though, was not for her. As I later learned in certain terms, Mescalero meant lunch to her, and a junction was no red flag urging her to wait.
And water would play its hand. My companion, alone in wilderness for the first time, had panicked. The couple who "saved" her roughly two hours after she and I parted company had found her peeling prickly pear pads for water. As Sara explained after the ordeal, "I thought I was going to die." She had even reflected on the lack of a will.
In this unexpected situation, I am reminded of the classic tale of Hugh Glass, an early Western fur trapper, who was mauled by a grizzly bear deep in Indian country. One of his two companions was the young and inexperenced Jim Bridger, who became a legendary guide. Glass was unconcious and apparently fatally injured when the other two left with his rifle to protect themselves. He regained his senses and realized he was abandoned. Unable to walk because of his wounds, seething with hatred and a determination to kill his former partners, he crawled to a trading post 200 miles away. Glass lived because of that anger. He later forgave his companions, a gesture not coming my way in the years since the ill wind blew.
No comments:
Post a Comment