Funny how things turn out sometimes.

I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, went to college in Massachusetts, and grew up (to the extent that I grew up at all) with fairly liberal political views. I am neither a hunter nor a serious fisherman. I have owned a series of foreign cars, but never a pickup. I have never owned a cowboy hat, either, and the first pair of cowboy boots I ever bought was from a hip boutique on the King’s Road in London. And I really, really hate the Dallas Cowboys. I am, in other words, a Yankee.

And then I fell in love with a girl from Texas, and everything changed. I have lived most of the last three decades—virtually my whole adult life—in the Lone Star State, a fact which still astonishes me and no doubt puzzles many of my childhood and college friends, to whom Texas is a vast desert filled with cacti, rattlesnakes, and gun-totin’, snuff-dippin’, rip-snortin’ Republican rednecks. Dangerous, in other words. But, almost thirty years later, here I am.

Heather and I were classmates and fellow English majors at that Massachusetts college, and we fell in love and/or lust during the spring of our senior year. Not only was she gorgeous, smart, and funny, but, being a native Texan, she was exotic, too. Her family lived in San Antonio until she was ten, when her father got a job with the gummint and they moved to the Washington DC area, but her father’s father still lived in the Alamo City, and she had a job lined up after graduation as a reporter for the late and not-terribly-lamented San Antonio Light.

I, on the other hand, had no job prospects whatsoever—planning ahead has never been my strong suit—and figured I might as well follow her to Texas. (I actually wrote to the San Antonio Spurs offering my services as a short, untalented point guard who couldn’t shoot, pass, jump, or go to my right, and received a surprisingly gracious rejection letter from Bob Bass, who was then the team’s general manager.)

After graduation, we embarked on an epic cross-country journey, driving in Heather’s un-air conditioned Toyota Tercel from Williamstown to San Francisco, by way of Washington DC, New Orleans, Houston, San Antonio, and Aspen, to visit my (divorced) parents, and then back to San Antonio to begin what we naively thought of as our adult lives.

The trip was full of incident, but the high points were our stays in Houston, where we visited Heather’s formidable maternal grandmother, and San Antonio, where we spent a week with her even more formidable paternal grandfather.

Boppa took one look at me, with my bushy beard, long hair, and earring, and decided, not unreasonably, that I was Bad News. The famous family story is that when we left San Antonio to push on to the West Coast, he called Heather’s father and asked, “Now where are those two going again?”

Heather’s father replied that we were heading to San Francisco to see my parents before eventually returning to San Antonio. There was a thoughtful pause, and then Boppa observed, “Lotta motels between here and San Francisco.”

When we finally made it back to San Antonio, we took him out to dinner twice a week, on the nights when “the help” was off; on Thursday nights we went to the Argyle, and on Sunday nights to the San Antonio Country Club. I drove the car, opened the doors, fetched him the one weak Chivas and water he was allowed per night, and generally did my best to ingratiate myself, but for the rest of his life (he died about six months later), he never called me anything but “Whiskers,” as in “Whiskers, get me a drink,” or “Whiskers, go git the car.” I’d tug on my forelock or fetlock or whatever that thing is and say, “Yes, sir,” and go off wondering what the hell I’d gotten myself into.

That was a tough year, in a lot of ways. I found work as the editor of a little weekly newspaper, the San Antonio Citizen-News, that served the southwestern part of the city around Lackland Air Force Base; since we were living in north-central San Antonio, I neither knew nor cared anything about that part of the city, so my job was not terribly fulfilling. I bought a used Fiat 128, which consumed several quarts of oil a week and was (in the way of all Fiats) almost comically unreliable, so twice a day I’d set off to drive across the city never knowing if I’d actually arrive at my destination, which didn’t exactly help my frame of mind. One hot afternoon the Fiat conked out in the middle of Broadway, and Heather and I had to push it several blocks to my apartment.

My most memorable co-worker at the Citizen-News was Oscar, the sports editor. He was a bald, stocky retired Air Force sergeant, and he cussed constantly and with amazing creativity. He also had a notorious temper; I was told that he carried a baseball bat in the trunk of his car, and if another driver cut him off or otherwise offended him he would pull it out and go to work on their fenders and taillights. Oscar was also apparently a creature of habit; the story was that once, when he came home to discover that his wife had rearranged the living room furniture, he wordlessly got out his toolbox, moved the furniture back to its previous positions, and nailed it to the floor. In fact, he was always perfectly nice to me, but I definitely tried to stay on his good side.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Heather and I broke up after a year or so in San Antonio. She moved up to Austin to begin graduate school, and I, once again flying blind, decided to move to Washington DC, where I landed a job on the staff of Sen. Bill Bradley. I enjoyed my time in Our Nation’s Capital, at times perhaps a little more than was good for me; I’m not sure my liver has ever forgiven me. But I got my feet under me a little bit, found out I could more or less survive on my own in the world, and eventually, a year or so later, Heather and I patched things up. I moved back to Texas, this time to Austin, where I too began grad school, in American studies. We got married a couple of years later, and the rest, as they say, is history.

And now here we are, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and I find myself the would-be co-proprietor of an enterprise that seeks to celebrate and emphasize the unique character of Texas, or at least the beautiful part of it known as the Hill Country. Our kids have grown up in Austin, and while all three have elected to leave the state for college (the youngest, a high school senior, is bound for Ohio next year), the older two have already come back. They’ve come back home.

What we’re reading
Heather: Heather Rogers, Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution
Martin: Katherine Howe, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane

Frederick Law Olmsted has been on my mind recently, in part because while we’re spending a few days in New York, we’re staying on Fifth Avenue, opposite the southeastern corner of Central Park, unquestionably Olmsted’s best-known creation.

Olmsted (1822–1903) was for all intents and purposes the father of American landscape architecture. Before he gained fame for reshaping much of the nation’s urban and suburban landscape, however, he was an adventurous journalist whose 1857 book A Journey Through Texas; or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier is a classic of Texas travel literature. In the book, originally published in serial form in the New York Times, Olmsted recounts a trip he took with his brother John in 1853–54, traversing the Lone Star State from the Sabine River to the Rio Grande.

In A Journey Through Texas, as in A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856) and A Journey in the Back Country (1861), Olmsted, a deeply committed abolitionist, attempted “to explain how slavery prolongs, in a young community [such as antebellum Texas], the evils which properly belong only to a frontier,” including “bad temper, recklessness, and lawlessness.” (And this was before Interstate 35 even existed!)

Olmsted was a great admirer of the German settlers of the Hill Country (who, he pointed out, managed to earn a respectable living without employing slave labor) and of their “private convictions of right, justice, and truth.” He repeatedly held their settlements—New Braunfels, Boerne, Sisterdale, and the like—up as examples of the sort of virtuous, prosperous, cultured communities that were possible where slavery did not exist.

For me, however, the best part of the book is Olmsted’s portrayal of Mr. Brown, the mule he and his brother bought in Natchitoches to carry their supplies. Mr. B., as Olmsted often referred to him, was “a stout, dun-colored, short-legged, cheerful son of a donkey, but himself very much a gentleman…. Though sometimes subjected to real neglect, and sometimes even to contemptuous expressions (for which, I trust, this, should it meet his eye, may be considered a cordial apology), he was never heard to give utterance to a complaint or vent to an oath. He traveled with us some two thousand rough miles, kept well up, in spite of the brevity of his legs, with the rest, never winced at any load we had the heart to put on him, came in fresh and active at the end, and, finally, sold for as much as we gave for him.”

Only once did Mr. Brown mutiny. As the party was preparing to cross Cibolo Creek, he suddenly gave “a snort of fat defiance” and raced off into the nearby scrub, attempting to scrape off the wicker hampers affixed to his sides. Olmsted noted admiringly that “a short-legged mule, when fully under way in a stampede, is ‘some pumpkins’ at going,” but they soon ran him down and brought him back under control, and Olmsted tied him to a tree with no supper as punishment. “When morning came, his ears and spirits were completely wilted, and he always carefully avoided the subject of his private Cibolo stampede—never afterwards offering the least symptom of insurrection.”

In another memorable passage, the party was crossing Chocolate Bayou when they unexpectedly encountered a dangerously muddy bottom. Olmsted and his brother managed, with some difficulty, to free their mounts and lead them to safety, abandoning poor Mr. B. to his own devices. “Looking back, to learn the fate of the mule, we beheld one of the most painfully ludicrous sights I have ever seen. Nothing whatever was visible of Mr. Brown, save the horns of the pack-saddle and his own well-known ears, rising piteously above the treacherous waves. He had exhausted his whole energy in efforts that only served to drag him deeper under, and seeing himself deserted, in the midst of the waters, by all his comrades, he gave up with a loud sigh, and laid upon his side to die, hoisting only his ears as a last signal of distress.”

Fortunately Mr. B. rallied his spirits for one last effort and succeeded in freeing himself and wading to safety, “dripping like a drowned rat.” The wicker baskets he carried were, of course, not waterproof; “the hampers had become two barrels of water, which, added to our ridicule, the mule, his excitement over, found more than he could bear, and, sitting down, he gave us a beseeching look, as if ready to burst into a torrent of tears.” Mr. Brown was clearly a sensitive soul, and I’m a little surprised that Olmsted could bear to part with him at the end of his journey.

While I have had no personal experience with mules, my earliest encounter with a burro left deep psychological scars. When I was just a wee lad, no more than three or four, my parents, my grandmother, and I all crammed into my father’s Fiat 1100 and undertook a family trip from San Francisco to Mexico City. Somewhere in the Sonoran desert, we stopped at a dusty roadside establishment for gas, and my parents bought me a bottle of Coca-Cola—a rare treat indeed. Clutching my precious bottle of Coke, I wandered over to say hello to the poor little burro penned beside the gas station.

I was shocked when the creature came over, stuck his head through the slats of the fence, seized the bottle in his yellow teeth, and yanked it out of my hands. He tilted his head back and drained the contents in one long gulp, whereupon I burst into tears. My parents bought me another bottle of Coke, and the same thing happened! (Apparently I’ve always been a slow learner.)

After the tragic loss of the second bottle of Coke, my parents decided not to continue funding the burro’s drinking habit; perhaps they feared the effects of the rapid accumulation of so much carbonated beverage in his stomach. At any rate, they bundled me into the car—still screaming, no doubt—and headed down the highway.

As I grew older, I was as susceptible to the romantic myth of the cowboy as the next kid, but ever since that trip to Mexico I have generally distrusted all members of the genus Equus. Coke wasn’t introduced until 1886, but I like to think that, faced with the same temptation, the gentlemanly Mr. Brown would have exercised more self-control than his larcenous latter-day Sonoran cousin. But then I’ve always tended to idealize my literary heroes.

What we’re reading
Heather: Krista Tippett, Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit
Martin: George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (still!)