The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 47. The Road to Mission Concepcion, San Antonio

Mission Concepcion, San Antonio

After our walk down to the Pedernales River, we headed out for San Antonio, or at least tried to.  I took a wrong turn, and we headed in a wrong direction, although it was an amazing one--a back road that ran through a squat forest of scrubby oaks all tangled together, clawing their way over and around low hills.  It looked pretty wild for central Texas.  We eventually got ourselves turned back around and ended up exiting the wilderness at Johnson City, which although not the way we came into Pedernales Falls State Park, it was at least a place I knew.  So, we headed towards San Antonio on U.S. 281, the main road through the Texas Hill Country, and also the best way to generally miss the hills altogether.  Four lanes wide in many places, and cluttered with civilization's junk, it will get you through the Hill Country; you just won't see much of it.   For that, you need to make use of the side roads like the one we just came off.  The Hill Country is an elusive thing, for it's not really made up of hills at all.  Rather, the topography is created by the eroded edge of the Edwards Plateau, and so even though "many of the hills rise to a height of 400-500 feet (120 -150 m) above the surrounding plains and valleys" (Wikipedia), one has to be in the right places to see them.  You're in them, and then you pop up on top of the plateau, and they're gone.  U.S 281 in most places rides a flat line across the top of the plateau and leaves you thirsting for the topography you came looking for in your miserable life amid the flatness that is the majority of Texas.  

Or, that's how you experience it as a transplant from Utah wilting away in Dallas.   Texans, on the other hand, think of the Hill Country as being something akin to the Himalayas or the Mount Kilimanjaro, an experience that will transform anyone passing through them into something a little more enlightened, a little more Texan.  Why the Hill Country is the spiritual center of Texas, I'm not sure.  Though lacking topography compared to the states to the west, Texas does boast some pretty rugged ranges, such as the Guadalupe Mountains on the border of New Mexico and the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park.  Both ranges dwarf any hills one might happen upon in the Hill Country.  One does not have to happen upon the Guadalupe Mountains at all.  Like any real range, it is not elusive.  It is a wall that can be seen miles off.

Yet, even as a westerner, I've got to admit, there is something significant that happens to your heart in the Hill Country when there is an unexpected turn in the road, and you drop for a while down into a narrow valley with a  clear, cool river winding between thickly forested hills.  It tricks your mind into thinking you've entered the foothills of some bigger range.  You imagine climbing up into higher stuff, where at some point, you will have a breath-taking view of snow-capped peaks.

   

That never happens, of course.  Texas is one big tall tale.  Still, there is something about descending into San Antonio from the west that reminds me of dropping into Denver from the west via I-70.  I will get to that, but, first I must cover lunch.  No trip is truly memorable without a significant lunch stop, which can be almost anything, even a Dairy Queen or a roadside picnic table.  The time on the road itself creates the memorable lunch stop.

We drove through the most amazing of towns, Blanco, which has the typical Texas downtown built around a town square with a courthouse plopped down in the center of the green.  Except, the downtown looks completely different than most small towns in Texas.  It looks like you're in Mexico.  This is due to the rough white limestone used to construct the buildings rather than the normal brick.  The downtown looks very borderlands old west.  Why I didn't stop, I don't have a clue, other than the rumblings in my stomach.  I'd glanced around, passing through, and when no food establishment caught my eye, drove on.  That, however, was a mistake.  The town screams, notice me, I'm unique.

Blanco may look like it belongs in Mexico, but as of 2010, of a total population of 1,701, 88% was white and only 23% Hispanic.  Yes, I too noticed that adds up to more than 100%, and still somehow another 1% of Blanco is African American and yet another 1% is Native American, and still another 7% is from other races (Wikipedia).  Either such is the complex nature of statistics everywhere, or more likely, such is the complex nature of getting at truth in Texas.  Reality in Texas is as elusive as vertigo in the Hill Country.   

Still, apparently the Blanco mirage has caught more than my attention.  The downtown is a registered historic district due to the unique architectural styles and building materials that comprise it.  This is how the part of downtown that caught my eye while driving by is described on the National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet by the National Park Service:

The west side of the square is the most complete commercial row and best represents the architectural diversity of the district. Beginning at the northwest corner, the Cage Building or Lindeman's Grocery (1908, Site No. BC 24) is constructed of rough limestone with load-bearing walls. Immediately south, the Old Theater Building (Site No. BC 25) is in contrast with its smooth, limestone-faced facade from the 1930s rising taller than its neighbors. To its south, two buildings continue this smooth facade at a lower scale. A change in facade material occurs in the next building, the Comparet Building (c. 1880, Site No. BC 28), with its ornate pressed metal upper facade and late-19th-century storefront. The 2-story Masonic Building (1907, Site No. BC 29) returns to the rough limestone facade as seen in the Cage Building. The three buildings completing the west side are constructed of brick and date from the 1920s (United States Department of Interior).

Even that dry, technical description of a legal document is picturesque without any mention of light, shadow or ambiance.  We should have parked, got out and had a romantic stroll.

However, since I was thinking with my stomach rather than my head, I stopped when it really mattered.  Not only that, I took a picture of what really mattered at the moment, the front door of Hacienda El Charro (Hours:  Mon.-Sun, 7 a.m. - 7 p.m.) even though the historic, white-stone facades of downtown were definitely more significant than an aluminum and glass door on a building with the type of siding you find on a shed or modular home.    The food, however, was tremendous and very reasonable.  I should have taken a picture of that instead.  It is, after all, the proper thing to do in this day of social media.  I simply failed at everything except feeding my gut.  

Hacienda El Charro:  very good food in Blanco, Texas

Like, I said earlier, the drive into San Antonio on 281 strangely reminds me of the descent into Denver from I-70 going east.  Obviously, it is not as dramatic.  The Hill Country is only a few hundred feet higher than San Antonio, rather than thousands, like Rockies rising over Denver, but there is the same mixture of woods, ranch land, rolling hills, and occasional rock outcropping with big homes on the hillside as you near the city.  Then the freeway widens, car dealerships and low high-rise office building pop up among the ever more patchier woods until you're in the city.  Perhaps that is a familiar scene when approaching most American cities.  After all, most American landscapes do have hills and wide river valleys where the cities sit.  However, I know very few cities intimately, and they don't follow that pattern.  Because Salt Lake City sits at the tiny toes of the Wasatch Front, which rises dramatically to the east, it is approached suddenly when going west.  Unlike Denver, there is no long, gradual decent.  It is a dramatic drop.  You're in mountains, high peaks all around you, and then boom!--the valley opens up, and you're there.  On the other hand, if you're approaching from the west, you cross the Salt Flats and a portion of the Great Salt Lake, which is as flat and barren as you can get.  Or from the South or North, you follow the valleys, so again, there's no long decline.  Reno, you enter through canyons from pretty much any direction but the south, which is a long meadow.  From the east El Paso is approached along the long river valley of the Rio Grande and the descent is made long before the city slowly builds.  Besides there are no trees for high-rise office buildings to poke their heads above.  And Dallas, well in Dallas, there is no such thing as descent or ascent.

So, it's likely dropping into San Antonio is not really that similar to descending into Denver.  My mind might have made it seem so because that was closest comparison my mind could find out of the cities I know well.  For some reason the brain functions on similes and metaphors even when comparisons are somewhat forced.  Terrified of the strikingly new, we move forward safely through analogy.  Oh, I can be comfortable with this because it is like that which I know well.

Whatever the approach is compared to, at some point San Antonio clearly becomes a big Texas city, complete with the ring-interstates and little clusters of glass-box skyscrapers reflecting back that big Texas sky, cars merging from every-which-way.  Yikes, Texas!

However, the minute you exit the freeway, San Antonio becomes unique again.  It is to Texas, what San Francisco is to California, Paris is to France, or Venice is to Italy.  It is simply stunningly beautiful.  It is a city of light, reflections, stone, culture and Romance.  I think one can even safely say without exaggeration that once you've visited San Antonio your life is never quite the same.  

We started this particular trip by visiting Mission Concepcion, which I hadn't seen before, and as we approached the towering aged glory I was absolutely stunned at how the centuries melted away and there I stood before some stone demonstration of both wealth and power and simultaneous humility to a power and glory even higher in a place and time I did not understand.  I might as well been zipped through a wormhole to the middle ages.

It was profoundly moving, and disorienting enough, that as I exited the car, i-pod in hand, I just kind of wandered around in awe, leaving Marci on her own, not knowing how to approach or what to do before this thing before my eyes.  Do I kneel down and pray?  Do I prostrate myself and kiss the ground?  Do I sacrifice myself before the gods?  That, of course, is a bit exaggerated.  But it honestly did take me off guard.  I was simply not prepared for something so gorgeous.  I had thought the River Walk is what makes San Antonio so special.  I was wrong.  It is at the very least the River Walk and the Missions together.  But, I have a feeling that as I make more trips back to San Antonio, I will come to realize it is San Antonio that makes San Antonio so special.  It is everything.  The hills, the missions, the canals, the foods, the musics, the languages, the literature, the arts, the cultures.  San Antonio is one of those special places where various forces compete and combine to create the jewels of human civilization.  Who would think such a place would rise out of the jackass-filled flat expanse that is Texas?  Not me.  But there it is, Rome or Paris, ringed with a white ranch fence with a gaudy ranch gate topped with bull horns leading to it.  If, like me, you're strapped on cash, skip Europe and head for old San Antone. 

References

United States Department of Interior . "National Register of Historic Places Registration Form." 5 June 1991. Registration Form. <https://atlas.thc.state.tx.us/NR/pdfs/91000890/91000890.pdf>.

Wikipedia. Blanco, Texas. 5 January 2020. 24 January 2020. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blanco%2C_Texas>.

—. Texas Hill Country. 16 January 2020. 24 January 2020. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Hill_Country>.