The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 52. Pedernales Falls State Park to the Exit to Iraan and Sheffield

Travel Date:  September 14, 2018.

The first time I ever saw Pedernales Falls, I was sorely disappointed.  Although I'd never been to the Hill Country before, I knew Texas fairly well, so I didn't expect much.  Yet, I guess I retained my western mind, for when I think of "falls", I think of something vertical, like Yosemite Falls, Yellowstone Falls, or many nameless small falls up any canyon in any of the Rockies, Great Basin ranges, Sierra's or Cascades.  Hell, even Minnesota, with as little topography as it has, still has water falls.  Leave it to Texas to grandly proclaim something with 6% grade "falls".  Under normal conditions, water delightfully trickles over, around, and through slick, polished, gently undulating  stone at Pedernales Falls.

In my expectation to see a vertical drop of water the first time I saw the falls, I missed the significance of all of that bare, polished rock, with little or no vegetation growing in a climate that produces plenty of verdant growth.  What I should have easily noticed is that although Pedernales Falls may not be steep, during a flood, it definitely would thunder.  The falls are really the chewed up river bed of a few giant rapids, the scouring marks of great floods.  Looking through the eyes of a geologist, it becomes clear that during high water those rapids are definitely a force to be reckoned with.  The series of calm little pools that are so delightful to wade in (despite warnings) are formed by the flood waters chewing at stone with gnashing teeth as nature lets loose another extra-passionate downpour, which happens frequently enough to not let any sizable trees take root.  It also happens frequently enough that the park put in sirens to sound impending doom to anyone foolish enough to drag lawn chairs down for a delightful picnic alongside one of those calm pools.

This time, already having my expectations dashed by the marvelous capacity Texas has for hyperbole, I rather enjoyed the falls.  The most extraordinary thing about the spot is that clear water bubbles out from every little rock and crevice.  There are springs everywhere.  A large part of the river volume just magically appears at the falls, with little bubbling wonders all over the place, which quickly become good sized creeks themselves before joining the river through woven stone paths.  Pedernales Falls should really be named Pedernales Springs.  That is a name the place could really live up to, as fully translated into English it would become Flints Springs.

After spending an hour down at the falls, we headed out for our day's journey.  The day was gray, and the thick tangled dark oak added to the wonderfully dreary mood.  A Romantic by nature, I find something sublimely uplifting about dread.  Gray days are a drug for me.  Cold, wet streets, and the sound of tires on wet pavement are intoxicating.  It didn't rain, but the low heavy skies promised such wonders, and I drove through the low hills in awe.

That is until we came to a purple delight just 19 miles down the road in Johnson City.  Marci had been talking about donuts since Austin.  Due to a health issue, I no longer consume sugar.  However, I do consume bright colors and quaint little eateries, so when I saw this Easter-egg beauty, I thought to myself, This is a place that will make us both happy.  And it did.  I even found food I could eat for they also serve biscuits, kolaches (whatever those are), croissants and tacos.  I believe I had a ham, egg and cheese croissant.  The food was good and the atmosphere was fantastic.  I have no idea how the doughnuts compared with the best doughnuts in the world, which are found in Reedsport, Oregon, for I couldn't have any, but we won't get it into that here.  Actually, living life without sugar is not as bad as people think.  Any optimistic paraplegic says the same about living life without limbs.

From Johnson City, we headed west on U.S. 290 towards Fredericksberg.  I was shocked to find myself in the heart of wine country for I knew the area from the 80s.  I guess a lot can change in a quarter of a century.  Back then, there were a few small, pleasant vineyards.  Now, it looked like Napa Valley, but then it really didn't.  The one real thing in Texas is that very little of it (other than the wide, flat expanses) is real.  Although I've got to admit I love it, the state is the most fake place I've ever been.  Everything is an overdone pretension.  Unlike other places, Texas lives out its daydreams.  Oh yeah, California thinks it can be France.  Well, we can out-France them any day.  Hell, we can even out-France France.  Only they can't.  What was once a beautiful landscape of low, chalky bluffs, very western, in a low scraggly, undramatic sort of way, is now a stage backdrop for very large and tacky stone mansions that dwarf the hills they perch pretentiously atop.  As none of this existed before, I assume it's so the well-to-do in Austin and San Antonio can spend their weekends pretending they are well-to-do Californians escaping the madness of the Bay Area in their sleek little red convertibles.  It was really depressing; the area had once really been Texas.  

We didn't think much of Fredericksberg either, even though back in Garden City, Jeff, our brother-in-law made it sound quite wonderful.  It was packed with Texas urbanites off to the country to dine and shop away from the restaurants and stores in their very own corner of suburbia.  I just don't get that.  It's the same in Colorado.  Why drive all that distance away from the city and drag all that crud with you?  That's one thing I admire about Californians.  For the population of that state, they do a remarkable job keeping their urban areas urban and their rural areas rural.  They don't build second homes all over the place.  They enjoy their urban lives, and when they want to get away, they drive up into the Sierras.  The national and state parks are packed, but at least there aren't condominiums, shopping centers and golf courses all over the woods.  They have there Tahoe (mostly to gamble and get drunk on the Nevada side) and they leave the rest of the wilds alone.  Too bad more of the country couldn't be the same.  I live into the country, but when I go to the city, I don't drag my country paraphernalia along with me.  The chickens and mangy mutts stay at home.  I even usually wash the car and vacuum out the mouse droppings.  Why can't urbanites have the same respect when they head out our way?  Wipe some mud on the car, throw a bail of hay in the back seat, and toss some old, rusty wrenches and mouse turds on the floor?  

We did eventually find Texas again.  Real Texas, like what folks picture in London or France, the Texas Chris Rea sings about--"Warm winds blowing / heating blue sky/ And a road that goes forever".  That is the Texas most Texans haven't seen before--that empty, dry space on the maps west of the Hill Country, which is where Texas ends for most Texans,  the Texas of creosote and parched earth.   And so, once we passed Fredericksburg, there was very little traffic.  Just heat and blue sky.  It was quite lovely.

There was a little more traffic once we joined I-10, but this far into west Texas, it still wasn't bad.  I'd forgotten how topographically-rich the terrain is on I-10 between Austin and Sonora.  In places around Junction, crews even had to blast through solid white limestone to lay down the freeway.  Exposed rock in Texas east of the Permian Basin is a rare thing to see.  Here there are white bluffs on long plateaus topped with black blobs of Juniper.  It felt western; it felt right.  

We stopped at the Pilot Travel Center in Junction to use the restroom and get a snack and drink.  On long road trips, these rather ugly metal contraptions of commerce become little oases.  Not only do they provide a place to get out and stretch your legs and relieve the pressure in your bladder that has been building mile upon mile, but they slow you down, especially when traveling the interstate.  They get you out of the artificially high flat terrain of the freeway and down into the rock, brush and natural undulations of the area.  They also slow you down so you can see the details.  I love long drives, but what I love best are those moments you exit that great river of concrete and enter a small tributary of real life, ugly gas stations, diners and all.  

And so we went on to Sonora and then to Ozona.  I wished I'd been better at capturing those miles.  I remember being pleasantly surprised at how striking they were.  I remember listening to music, sucking on sugar-free candy, listening to Marci talk and then snore.  I remember wishing she were awake to see this or that little thing on the horizon that caught my eye.  I remember her reading silently, then aloud, as she explored the landscaper of her book while I explored the landscape out the windshield.  I just don't remember the particulars.  I should have recorded those.  The glory of God is in the details.  Miss the small things and the epic just becomes a rather bland plot.

I do know at some point I was struck enough by the landscape to exit the freeway again, not for a drink, not to take a pee.  Just because the landscape called to me.  There I found a green highway sign.  One arrow pointed Iraan, the other to Sheffield.  How long or far to either I did not know, but there, under that heat and blue sky and a road that seemed to go forever, that they existed mattered, and for a small moment I just stood there and experienced life.  

Then I got in the car, opened a Coke Zero, grabbed a piece of jerky and headed back to the freeway with my wife of twenty-one years by my side.

  

   

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 51. Hell Is Confinement, Darkness, Heat and Humidity

We arrived back at Pedernales Falls State Park well after dark, just before 10:00 p.m.  I worried the whole way back that we might not make it.  Marci doesn't have the concept down that you can be locked outside of your campground.  Normally, when you go camping out west, it is at national forest campgrounds, which only have seasonal gates, and once the campground is open for summer, you can come and go as you please, so long as you pay your nightly fee and don't stay over 14 days.  Your campsite is your home.  You can arrive or leave anytime you like.

Not so east of the Rockies.  Campgrounds there are usually in state parks and have strict park hours with tight security.  At 10 p.m., gates close and no one enters or leaves--at least not by vehicle.  I too was once ignorant of Eastern outdoor protocols.  Where I come from, you just pull your trailer out in the desert and park it wherever you want, and there you go--camping.  If you are more civilized, you pull into a small little campground up a canyon beside a stream that has few sites and a single outhouse with a green fiberglass roof.  Even the national parks let you come and go as you please.

But no, not back East.   Even some national forest campgrounds (in the rare places there is national forest) lock their gates after 10:00.  It's just that way.  So, as I worried and fretted, Marci listened to music, sang la-la-la-la along with it, and told me not to worry.  It was damn irritating.  I half hoped we'd have to spend the night sleeping in the car just so I could say, "I told you so."

As it turned out we made it.  I can't even remember if there was a gate.  We just drove on into an eerily empty state park and then dropped down through the thick, short oak woods to an almost vacant campground.  There was one other occupied site, just across the road from us.  I feared we might be chopped up in the night, thrown into the camper, and driven off in the morning to be consumed later.

When we opened the car door, heat and humidity hit like a wall.  Out west, nights are cool, even on the Fourth of July.   When we go to see the fireworks, we take sweaters and blankets, and some years, that is not enough.  It is simply not supposed to be above 70 degrees at night.  It must have been like 85 that night.  And if there is moisture in the air, it is suppose to fall.  It's not supposed to hang out up there in the air, dancing all around you, going, "You wan't cool, refreshing rain, don't you--Well, ha, ha, ha!  I'll make you sweat torrents of stinky slime instead!"  Of course, I lived eight years in Dallas, so I should have known it would be like this, but what the mind remembers abstractly, the senses do not.  I was shocked and horrified.  My nostrils simply would not accept this new reality as normal.

As we had set up our tent before going to San Antonio, we were able to go right to bed.  We were tired and I quickly fell asleep.  However, I woke up in the middle of the night in a sweat.  When I opened my eyes, the tent was four inches above my head.  It was small and we were on cots, but the cozy space had not bothered me during the cold nights of the Rockies.  Something about the heat and humidity changed everything.  I felt like I couldn't breath, and the visual reminder of the tight space just intensified it.  I felt like my entire body was being consumed by a worm. I started to panic, which made breathing even harder.  I felt I'd go crazy in my own skin.  Finally, I woke Marci and pleaded to change places.

Next to the door, I unzipped the flaps, rolled them back and stared out the screen into the invisible but all too real heat and humidity as I waited for death.  Eventually, I dozed off and got some sleep before dawn.  When I woke up, random drops of rain hit the tent with a ping.  Outside, the sky was low and heavy, but other than that all was well.  I was alive and excited to meet the day.