Events!

I'm driving up to San Marcos in a little bit to hear Dr. James Adavasio speak and to prove to myself that, little by little, I am coming back. Sunday I'll be going to Austin, to BookPeople and Greg Leitich-Smith's book launch.

On Veteran's Day, I took Moby out for a bit, to replace two dodgy tires and get the oil and coolant checked. I feel a lot of kinship with Moby at the moment, as bits of him stop working properly and are replaced - the driver's side seat belt, the interior door handle - or not - one of the door locks, that strip of chrome that the gas station ate when I parked a bit too close to the pump. Yet he keeps moving, and so do I.

And whereas, someday, inevitably, Moby will limp off to the junkyard to be stripped down for parts, or get donated to one of those charities that takes even cars that won't move anymore to generate money in some mysterious way (which presumably amounts to the same thing), I will someday cycle all the way up again, and transform all the mental coolant and oil I've been sucking down into - something. I don't know what. But I know I will. It's in there. Somewhere.

Gestating.

Whether I can transform whatever it is into income to justify my existence to the consumer society, I don't know. So I stick that consideration onto the shelf in my head marked "Stuff I can't do anything about right now" and keep gestating, and even occasionally driving to hear speakers and cheer other authors on.

Meanwhile, I'd better get some lunch. Because lunch is inevitable.

Armadillocon 2015

I just booked Damon's membership and our room for Armadillocon 2015.

I'm not sure why they want me. I'm not sure I'm a draw. I'm not sure I'm up to it. But I'm going and it'll sort itself out.

Because nothing good happens if you don't give them a chance; and the bad things that can happen aren't that bad.

Some Notes on the Trip to Santa Fe

I don't sleep well even at home - away from home at best I get microsleeps - and apparently 7000 feet is enough to bring on altitude sickness and even the professional archeologists, better-prepared than me for absorbing stuff about sites and dates and geology and genetics and weather modeling, were complaining happily that their heads hurt with all the new information acquisition going on at the conference, so it's not surprising I'm crashing now I'm home. But, being who I am, I had a notebook with me, so let's see if I can put together a blog post from the scribbles I made in it on the way home (taking notes during sessions is hopeless; I just open my eyes and ears, let everything flood in, and let my backbrain sort it all out).

If nothing else, this example of the kind of random jaggedy prose that gets put into authors' notebooks should cure you of any romantic notions you may have about them. Notebooks are for notes. Any poetry or greatness in them is accidental, I don't care if it's my notebook or Hemingway's (or even DWJ's, who surpasses Hemingway in all things).

Ahem.

I don't know whether it was the car or the road but I slowed down coasting downhill.

Santa Fe is uphill from Albuquerque. My ears never popped. (This is significant because normally flying is like being under psychic attack - the air pressure changes assault my ears as if they wielded ice picks. But not this time. Apparently my ear doctor's advice to snort Afrin before flights is good.)

Petroglyph National Monument is inside the city limits or at least the exits were. I never saw these exists on the way north when I might have taken advantage of them.

The mountains have scalloped irregular edges like a pressure-worked chert flake.

My feet cracked badly at the tendons. Dryness I presume.

The automatic faucets waste water in the convention center.

Everyone I met was pleasant and relaxed, and helpful. I have not heard a cross word here.

I have not seen as many brown faces as I would have expected. Nor kids!

The last two nights the room breathed hard, like a giant coffee maker.

I could not ID an accent.

Stan Lee was in charge of the parking lot I used the first night. (It was uncanny - same voice! A little shorter. I expected him to say "Excelsior!")

Scant birds. The ones in Santa Fe all seemed to be black and vaguely hawklike. Only thing I ID'd was a house sparrow.

The Gringo Market. (This was a joke a man on the city bus - a satisfyingly dark brown man - made about the tents in the plaza on Saturday, the Gringo Market as opposed to the Spanish Market.)

The people at the bus stop talking at length about a scheme by which the city could take some of the desperation out of homelessness and reduce crime committed in order to find a place to stay the winter. Schizophrenia not considered in the discussion. Also, how to deal with dryness cracks. Liquid Vitamin E extolled as the best.

The woman in the next seat as I wait in the airport is on her phone and I'm finding out far too much about her life. Never seems to leave any time for an answer. She says she's a wreck but she maintains a flat, almost monotonous tone.

Pick-ups pulled onto the shoulder at regular intervals all the way SF to ABQ this AM.

Flying over the desert you can see the drainages, more than you'd ever imagine there were, the textures on the ground, the parts between, the desert, like painted concrete just washed with color and the roads the cracks between the slabs. Fields agribusiness all squares and circles, half circles, pie charts, PacMan, green and dust in squares on the flat land, and the drainages black and furry between, reservoirs and ponds flat and in the light it can be hard to tell if they have water in them or not, whether the color is the dust color because of the light or because they're dry or because - and there was a reservoir like this - because the water is silty. You could see the water in the deep part the color of water and then it turned silty in one part and then you could tell where the beach was through it was the same color as the water; next to each other you could see the contrast in the textures.

Some other day when I can type coherently and at length I will discuss the cool things I saw at the conference. I did like Santa Fe, altitude sickness and all; and if you're going I recommend the Burro Alley Cafe. They don't salt their fries and they took excellent care of me when I stumbled in fighting a migraine the first day.

First Times at Fifty-two

Off to Santa Fe tomorrow morning. I'm not nervous, exactly, but it occurs to me that there's a number of things on this trip I'll be doing for the first time.

I've never been to Santa Fe.

I'll be renting a car at the airport - I've never done that. On previous trips when I was by myself, I either couldn't drive and had to arrange alternate transportation, or was going somewhere that alternate transportation was easier than renting a car and having to look after it for the duration.

I don't know anybody at my destination, not even to the extent of having professional contact.

It's not a professional convention, or a fan convention. It's a professional convention to which I'm going as a fan.

And I'm not obsessively making lists and double checking them and trying to get everything packed the night before. Damon is driving me to the airport, we don't leave until ten - if I forget something, I'll forget something, but I bet I don't.

I've been traveling since before I can remember. When did I hit "mellow?"

Is 52 the age when mellow kicks in?

It also pleases me that I have done things for the first time often enough before that when it's time to do new things again, I'm not stressed about it. I know how to do new things. It's not a big deal.

I hope I'm still doing new things when I'm 104. Because if I'm not, being 104 won't be any fun.

The laptop I have doesn't turn on reliably so I'm not bothering to take it, so I won't be logging on till I get home next Sunday, or the day after. See y'all around.

Or, if you happen to be in Santa Fe, track me down at the PaleoAmerican Odyssey Conference. Unless you're that damn stalker, of course. I'll be wearing either something with variations on cave art or a "save the woolly mammoth" t-shirt.

Because I'm going as a fan and there's no need to hide it.

Losing Track

Yesterday I went looking for the paperwork on my trip to the PaleoAmerican Odyssey Conference in Santa Fe next month, and couldn't find any. Since I'm not as organized about filing as I ought to be (I used to be great at it in soul-sucking dayjobs where I was desperate to fill my time) this didn't prove anything, but as far as Damon and I could reconstruct it, about the time I meant to register we had a sudden influx of demands on our money, and I put it off till a new payday, at which time the intention to register had transformed into a memory of having registered.

Property tax season is an unfortunate time to plop an extra $225 + airfare + hotel into the budget, and I was thinking I should probably not go (looking at my dismal money-making record for the year), but Damon, who will have to do all the money juggling, said if I didn't go I'd regret it, and he'd figure it out. So I'm registered, and have a hotel booked, but have not bought the plane ticket yet. (This is why creative people should marry supportive practical people.)

And digging in my paperwork reminds me that quarterly income tax is coming up in five days, too, so better to not let that get away from me, either. I actually have income to report and may even make a small profit on the year, hurray! But my, uh, ledger isn't up-to-date, so I'm not sure.

Even market research is more fun than filing and accounting, but you can't do the big fun stuff like this without them, so take a minute and look around. What have you lost track of lately?

Observations on Conventions

Hotel stays are much less stressful if you have a refrigerator in your room.

It's much less lonesome to conk out of going to the late night party stuff if you're sharing a room with someone who also conks out.

No matter how many people tell you how wonderful you are, there will always be a period on the way home when you're writhing with embarrassment at what you said, or did, or meant to say or do and didn't, which everybody else has forgotten, or never known, about. Get over it.

Unpacking from the con is exponentially harder than packing for it.

Being frugal in the dealers' room is not a good excuse to splurge on the way out of town. So you may as well splurge in the dealers' room, and get the money circulating in the fandom again.

I'm never sure if people look familiar because I've met them, because we've been at a lot of the same conventions, or because they have body, hair, face, and clothing styles that are typical of the subculture. Odds are good other people are wondering the same thing about me.

Scheduling snafus are to be expected.

Surf the chaos and profit from the experience.

Pleistocene Geek Out!

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog's 3D film of the Chauvet cave - into which the public is not allowed! - is showing in Austin at a small theater. Reserved tickets are necessary.

http://violetcrowncinema.com/

Damon and I will be in Row C for the 2PM showing Saturday, May 28. AKA, tomorrow.

It's a little far to go to see a movie, but a piddling distance to see prehistoric cave paintings in 3D. I'd have gone as far as Dallas; maybe further with planning.

Thanks to Tasha, to whose google fu we owe this outing!

Idea Garage Sale: Stranded

This post is dedicated to Lupe, Peggy, JoEllen, Kay, Ben, Jeremy at Brake Check on S. Lamar, Jose at the St. Edwards University Information desk, and all the people behind me on the road when Moby wouldn't stop turning; without whom my Austin trek would have been way too exciting.

Because of all these people, my story is not a candidate for a novel; but as I waited in Brake Check for the last adjustments so I could finally drive home I reflected on how a novel that started with a car that won't stop turning could develop. The driver/protagonist would need to either be cut off from the friends and sympathetic, professional strangers I was able to rely on, or opposed to relying on them for some reason. Since the show on the TV in the lobby at the time was America's Most Wanted, the first thing that occurred to me was that the driver had a body in the trunk; but that's an antagonist, not a protagonist.

(Or maybe not. A nimble thriller writer could keep you guessing on this subject, depending on the backstory of the body.)

Let's make the driver a teen. One of my difficulties was that I had no cell phone. (I suspect we're going to break down and get one shortly.) All modern teens have cells, so why would this one be without? I could make it a historical story, but this by itself suggests no plot. What if the teen is a runaway and has ditched her cell because she knew it could be traced?

That opens possibilities. Why isn't she afraid of the car being traced? Maybe she is. Maybe the car is stolen, so instead of proceeding on the assumption that she needs to take it straight to the garage, she proceeds on the assumption that she needs to risk driving it a little bit longer, at least till she can steal one that works better.

What is she running from? Or, more pertinently, who? Is she being actively sought? Does she have enough criminal savvy to rely on stealing a new car, or enough mechanical skill to diagnose and jerryrig a fix for the problem on this one? What are her skills and resources? What's in the car with her? Did the previous owner leave behind anything that would surprise her or affect her choices?

Is anyone with her? Does she, who has no one to rely on, feel responsible for someone else?

Where is she going once she gets mobile again?

I'm too tired to answer all these questions right now. But if I could, I'd have me a plot.

Another Research Trip: Hill Country State Natural Area

Saturday Damon and I went in search of cliffs. Our most relevant venue was Hill Country State Natural Area, where I have camped once and he has not. For a variety of reasons, we were not camping this weekend; but I needed to re-experience the terrain, and he didn't want me out in it by myself. This meant driving out in the morning, which meant no real shot at the good birds and hiking in the hot part of the day, but our choices were limited and I need a cliff.

So we parked in the second equestrian camping area, planned a route that would give me the right kind of terrain but wouldn't demand too much of us, and headed out with our backpacks full of food and water bottles that had been left in the freezer overnight. (These are essential travel accessories in Texas in the summer, which lasts till October. Don't leave home without them.) Plus, binoculars and the Peterson Guide because you never know.

We monitored each other. We stopped as often as either of us needed to. We drank frequently. We checked the map every time we came to a cross trail. I talked about the scenes that need to happen and the problems involved in making them integral, logical parts of the story. Damon talked around the problems he's having with the next phase of the Pathfinder campaign. He couldn't talk about the problems directly because I'm playing under him, but he used to work high-security systems in the Service and we have a lot of practice in the sorts of conversations that help him find his solution without giving me sensitive data.

We found more than one cliff and one thing I realized is, that it doesn't have to be a major movie cliff where you look down and see the backs of eagles to be a major life-or-death choice to jump one. Even if you strip out most of the brush and trees, which are a relatively modern development in the area, these five- and six-foot drops could be neck-breakers. On one, the top of the cliff was dirt held in place by vegetation over a layer of ankle-turning rocks and a sheer drop down to a slope. Another was not so much a cliff as a rockshelter on the edge of what would have been, in 1865 before we started draining our aquifers, a live creek. In order to descend safely, your horse would either have to make a precision jump to a boulder in the middle of the water and then a hop to the other side of the creek, or take off with enough momentum to carry him what looked, from the bottom, like a ridiculous distance to secure ground. The creek beds here are for the most part deep V-shapes with broad tops, and of course all the brush and trees would be concentrated there in the sea-of-grass days.

Anyway, I kept trying out scenarios and sequences and combinations of circumstance, playing with the variables of the plot. And at some point - not because we weren't paying attention! - we realized that every time we looked at a map we realized that the previous time we'd looked at a map we hadn't identified our location correctly. We went on far more difficult trails than our plan had called for. One of them may even have been a game trail rather than the marked path we thought it was.

We weren't lost, not in the sense of being in danger of needing search parties to track us by the circling vultures. From lunchtime on, we always knew where we were in relation to the access road, and we followed, sort of, the general area of our original route. By the second time we crossed the road, we were drinking our water faster than it was melting and Damon was crashing. So I volunteered to go ahead and bring the car back to pick him up. Sensibly, he agreed. He got over all that macho no-I'm-fine stuff shortly after the Year from Hell.

But by the time I reached the first equestrian camp I was crashing kind of hard myself. Hard enough to ask for help. All I intended to ask for was a lift to the second camp; but what I got was a family doctor who carried me straight back to get him and gave him Gatorade and tangerines. He had to lie down for a little while, and then I drove us back to Bandera for more water and Gatorade, and back toward home as far as Helotes, where I crashed during the stop at Stellar Books. By that time he felt much better and was able to drive us home. We spent all of Sunday recovering - I had in fact saved Mockingjay for just such an occasion, as I knew I wouldn't be doing anything useful between its first and last pages anyway. I'm not quite over it yet.

On Sunday morning I got up and read on my writing listserve that the husband of one our members, who are all my friends even though I've never seen most of them in the flesh, had died while climbing in the Rocky Mountains, at about the same time that my husband was not dying or even being seriously ill, just massively uncomfortable.

Yeah, I don't know how to react either. Nobody ever does.

It might have been different, for either of us. But it wasn't. Nobody outlined this. Nobody decided that this husband was still necessary to the plot or that the other husband's most dramatic impact could be achieved by dying. No one put a doctor in my campground instead of close enough to the accident site to save my friend's husband's life. It was all contingency, chance, individual and collective choices, physics, biology.

We like stories partly because nothing in them is arbitrary. Narrative imposes order onto the chaos of real life. Narrative creates meaning. But if real life were like that, we'd want to lynch the author.

Location Scout #3: Castroville

Ever since I realized the part played by cotton speculators in the lesbian western I've known that part of my story would have to be set there. Not until yesterday did I realize how hard it would be not to set half the book there.

My Reverend Mom lives in Medina County, further west than my characters have any reason to go during the course of the plot (AFAIK!), so I met her in Houston Square and we walked around a bit. The original plan was to do the Historic Walking Tour, but we quickly realized the limitations of the tour for my purposes. We spent quite a bit of the morning at the Landmark Inn, in Len's day a gristmill, general store, and residence occupied by John and Rowena Vance, a couple not without prominence in San Antonio history, too. Between us, and with the assistance of the locals and the signage (though the signage has some problems; according to one historical marker, Henri Castro died in 1861; to another, in 1865) we figured out how the San Antonio Road ran, where Len would have come into town from Geronimo, and which places she would visit once she got there. Rev. Mom also helped me work out how Len gets the corpse onto Bean in the first place - the practicality of that part bothered her a lot.

Yes, writing is a solitary profession and can lead you to neglect your family; but it's good to talk through difficulties with someone else once in awhile. Usually my husband gets stuck with this part, but it's good to spread the intellectual puzzlement around.

After a picnic down by the dam (also attended by ants and a tiny empidonax flycatcher), Mom decided she'd done all she could, so I walked her back to Houston Square and started again, making notes about the original priest's house, the Catholic church (annoyingly, the first and third ones still stand, but only a photograph of the one Len saw remains), and the course of the roads before starting the tour again. I was delightfully hung up at the Old Alsatian Steakhouse, where the owners (of the restaurant, not the property) were happy to sort out for me which part of the building was standing when and to show me the barbeque pit that's going to be an archeological site next month.

By 3:00 in the afternoon, my notebook and the booklet with the walking tour map in it were both scribbled up with illegible notes, my feet were sore, my water was almost gone, I was cross-eyed from looking at early Castroville architecture, I had names and even e-mail addresses for people I need to talk to, and I knew where and when the next Conservation Society meeting was, should I decide to crash it. I think I sat for a half an hour on the bench in front of Tour House #31, Hans Meat Market, which wasn't even relevant since it wasn't built till 1910; but it has a view of the saloon across from the courthouse where Len will go to report the crime and also happened to be where my feet gave out. I was only halfway through the tour sites on the north side of the highway - for now, at least, the only ones beside the Landmark Inn that matter - but I'd come to the end of my ability.

Well, almost. I realized, looking through the places I'd managed to miss even though I'd walked right by them, that a Certain Person would be well-known at the Tarde Hotel, if it was in fact operating as a hotel at that time. And why wouldn't it be? Frederick Law Olmstead had declared it the best hotel he stayed in during his travels through Texas in the mid-50s, and the Mexican traffic would have been heavy enough to support any number of hotels, assuming that military personnel, merchants, and officials accompanied the actual cotton trains (which presumably camped on the edge of town) in anything like a reasonable proportion. So I managed to stagger by for a look at it before returning to Moby, locating a convenience store, renewing my fluids, and leaving town.

I will go back and intend to take my husband at least once. I owe it to the Old Alsatian Steakhouse to bring them some business and need to speak to them again. Possibly this weekend, though I'm also supposed to go to Belton on Saturday, where Mike Collins of Gault is having a signing for his new book. Clovis Technology , by Bruce Bradley, Michael B Collins, & Andrew Hemmings, is a technical work, but if you're into that kind of thing, the signing's 2:00 to 4:00 PM Saturday, May 15, at the Bell County Museum in Belton. I may have to ditch Pleistocene archeology for Civil War archeology in June, if I can get in with that dig; but that doesn't excuse my falling behind!

Once again I have more things to do than I am physically capable of doing. Crashing that Conservation Society meeting would have made contacts of the sort I'm going to need in order to find out what I need to know; but I would have had to stay late in Castroville and was not at all sure I could make a good first impression. So I decided against it. Now I have to follow up those leads, organize my notes, plan the Belton trip - and oh, yes, clean my house, cook my low-sodium meals, feed birds and cats and husband, keep on the right side of code compliance in my - ahem - wildscaped yard, update this blog, and make some headway on the, um, six sewing projects I want to do before August.

I didn't do any of that this morning. I wrote on the story. Because everything else is organized around that, and if I lose sight of the needs of the story, I'll be spinning my wheels and wearing myself out to no purpose.

Sometimes I compare myself with the truly dedicated people who have made the great contributions to art, science, and various other passions, and feel how little I measure up. But that only makes me more tired, just when I ought to feel energized. Much better to take half an hour off to let the brain unsnarl, and then pick a job and get back to work.

Location Scout #2: Medina County

Almost as soon as I get past the shadow of the I-35 heading south and west of downtown I begin to feel the sky opening up into the South Texas plain. It's hard to judge how far west the city extended in the days I'm thinking of. It's tempting to cut off the town at the present interstate highways running down either side of it, 10/35 on the west and 37 on the east. Mauermann's map encourages me to do so, extending only as far as Pecan in the east and with Laredo the last named street to the west; but since historically these areas are the "black" and "Mexican" parts of town, respectively, and since numerous important sites are indicated off the edges of the map, I'm disinclined to take it at face value. The area west of San Fernando, per one source, was called "Laredito" during the relevant period; and west of Laredo Mauermann shows two distinct streets (modern Santa Rosa and San Saba, I think), numerous tracks, clusters of buildings, the "Dutch windmill," and the plain where Gen. Sheridan reviewed troops. My 1852 plat map also lays out much of the area inside modern Loop 410, with small townlots not giving way to larger lots till west of Alazan Creek. My impression is that the town became less townlike and more villagelike out this way, and that I should mentally replace the present lively cultural life represented by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and the giant votive candle with an equally lively suburban life of market gardens, jacales, and a working class that (if we may believe all the accounts of nightly fandangos from this period) also knew how to party hard.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with this, and that's Castroville. The Old Castroville Road loses its identity and merges with U.S. Hwy. 90 at Callaghan Road, within site of Wilford Hall, the tallest portion of Lackland AFB, and it doesn't take long after that to feel that you've "left town." The south side doesn't sprawl nearly as much as the north side (which is a shame, because there's less aquifer to interfere with out there) and though technically you're not out of town till you pass 1604, functionally the border is still 410. This is rolling prairie, not rolling hills, and its beauties require a more trained and subtle eye willing to see a good long way. I like it, myself. The flowers were overwhelmingly yellow and the sky was overwhelmingly blue.

Although technically Castroville was an information stop to get local maps and information to assist me in getting as close as possible to the old Mormon settlement shown on my mid-19th-century county map, I spent a lot more time there than I meant to. Medina County presents a more diffuse historical presence to the visitor than Bandera did - not that local history isn't being done, or that tourist interest is not sought, but that it has no central depository and no single figure that automatically draws the eye. The online presence is negligible, and has no central building. I've received no reply from the first e-mail I sent and the Chamber of Commerce had no contact information to give me. The historical walking tour is on my List of Things to Do, and if I spent too long at Koenig Park blame the barred owls (two of them!) that all by themselves made the day worthwhile. The librarian with the son in Mico and the Chamber of Commerce maps agreed that getting around the west side of Lake Medina was not practical, but were a big help in sorting out what series of county roads to follow.

To approximate the route to the Mormon settlement, take 471 north from Castroville. This is open prairie, with a fringe of hills cutting off the far distance to the west. At Rio Medina, turn west to cross the river on 2676. This bend is shown clearly on the 19th-century map and I presume the river at this point is fordable, but the bridge feels so high above the river and I had already spent so much more time than I intended that I didn't get a good look at. I did not stop in Rio Medina on the way up; and on the way back the "lady who knows," Bonnie Jaks, wasn't at the general store, so I'm still not sure whether Len would meet any real people on her way through here; however, I'll find out.

The Medina River at this point is a boundary line - once across it, you're in the Hill Country. Turn north again at the first right turn you come to. This is CR 271 and will be your lifeline. The road is narrow, with a marge of wildflowers - Indian blanket mostly right now - and then cedar/live oak scrub with some mesquite. The open sky prairie is gone, and I'm afraid I didn't see as much as Len did, because Moby, unlike Len's faithful steed Bean, cannot be trusted not to go off the road while I'm figuring out what the understory plants are. If you want to stop you generally have to block a gate across a private drive or road or crush some wildflowers. The road winds more than it appears to on the map; and Mico is less obvious.

When the dam was constructed in 1912, it drowned not only the Mormon Settlement, but the road to it. As near as I can tell, present-day 151 was the Castroville Road down from Bandera; it vanishes on the north side of the lake now into a maze of private roads. Its nearest heirs on the south side of the lake are the complex, twisty network of 260, 264, and 271. In 1936, a historical marker for the settlement, under the name of "Mountain Valley" (not to be confused with modern Mountain Valley Ranch) was erected on the dam; however, Homeland Security has closed the dam and you can't see even the historical marker anymore. Although the marker claims the settlement was abandoned in 1858, I've seen other information indicating that it had people in it who needed relocating in 1912. The nice Mr. Wilburn I ran across in front of the Mico Volunteer Fire Department gave me the phone number of the man organizing the centenniel, so maybe I'll be able to find out! (Their web page calendar is blank, but their fund raising barbeque is Saturday, May 8th, so if you're in the neighborhood, consider showing up.)

I began to feel discouraged poking around back there. I ate lunch in a turnaround on CR 271 because all the lakefront recreational areas on the south side of the lake are privately owned. I only had $16 on me, and entrance fees based on the assumption that you and a carful of kids are going to hike, boat, fish, swim, picnic, and generally raise cain on the property all afternoon were too rich for my blood. What started out as a massive irrigation project has turned into a recreation lake and a flash point for property rights and public access disputes.

I don't blame the proprietors for my lowered mood. Everyone I spoke to was as friendly and helpful as I could wish. This isn't like the hotels on South Padre Island cutting the locals out of beachfront for the sake of rich tourists; or even the gated community syndrome of rich folks buying up all the pretty and shutting the riffraff out, though such people exist. Locals trying to support a rural lifestyle by making rural pursuits available to citydwellers would be fools to charge less than they can get or make exceptions for researchers who just need a quiet spot to eat trail mix and make notes on floral and faunal assemblages. The only state park on the lake is in Lakehills, on the Bandera County side of the lake, and as state parks go it's nothing to write home about, at least not when the water's down and, as I was, you're too tired to explore properly. (There was supposed to be a $10 use fee even there, but I didn't see anybody to pay, so I didn't.)

The discouragement was the result of a number of factors - frustration at not being able to peel back the present and see the past underneath; the balance-challenged prairie native's unease at having all her lines of sight cut off by graded roads, hills, and second-growth brush; and my natural afternoon crash. But I realized, sitting at a picnic table and wondering if the relief of getting into the water with the frolicking dogs would be worth the effort of finding a place to change into my suit, that my discouragement is a road into Len's head. She wouldn't be crossing this terrain alone (except for Bean) in the first place if she weren't in deepest black teen-age despair. So I thought about that for awhile, and made notes. Mountain Valley to her would feel like the Valley of Doom. And then, on the wind, the letters blowing into her hand, Di's voice in the silent paper; and the echoing directionless shots, and the vultures circling.

So I headed back the way I had come - it would have been shorter to go up to 16, but that wasn't the point of this trip, and I wanted to stop in Rio Medina. Along a stretch of 271, I had noticed different flowers among the Indian blankets, flowers I haven't seen anywhere else so far, of a deep wine color, and when I started coming to them again I stopped to take a closer look. They're poppy mallow, or wine cups. And as I studied them, and tried to decide if the drive I was blocking was ever used, I heard a deep "chup chup chup" across the road. So I crossed. And there they were. The vultures.

Black vultures, which are expanding their range and I suspect will have to be displaced by turkey vultures in the story. I didn't have my camera on me and they flew off, chup chup chup with their ponderous black wings, but first they told me clear as can be: the body's here, among the winecups. And Len, gathering as many of his daughter's scattered letters as she can, comes out of her own blackness to resume the duties of humanity, hard as they are.

I didn't take a picture because I know how it would turn out, the birds all flown, just an open space in the brush with a mesquite tree. It didn't look like this back then, anyway. Livestock has been run up here; people have tried to make their living off this land; it would have been a more open and a more mature vegetation and I'll have to do the best I can with it. Since that moment of certainty I've been awake half the night working out what problems this site solves and which new ones it creates. But I'm not going to argue with vultures.

Half a mile later a roadrunner let me see him scamper along the roadside. I project my feelings onto nature and give meaning to birds. The barred owls in the morning were a promise; the vultures fulfilled it; and the roadrunner confirmed it. Knowing that the birds didn't notice me and couldn't care less if I ever write a story or not doesn't change that. Meaning is a human construct.

Location Scout #1: Bandera

Mentally stripping away the changes wrought by the passage of time and the activities of humans is something I'm accustomed to doing by now, but there's no denying it's harder to do while driving than at any other time. So I pulled off onto the shoulder a couple of times, to birdwatch and make copious illegible notes (it'll be all right as long as I transcribe them soon enough) on soil characteristics, the succession of wildflowers, the smell of the air, insects and other fauna, and other things that my characters, picking their way down from the hills on horse and possibly camel-back, will have plenty of time to notice. I'll have to take care to remove some features - starlings and dandelions did not overrun the Texas countryside in 1864 - and add in others - the faunal assemblage would have been far more abundant, with butterflies rising at each step, and more diverse, including mustangs, bears, and panthers - but that's easy enough. The climate has also changed, but both 1863/64 and 2009/10 were unusually cold, long winters, and though we haven't had anything like the spring floods that hit the Hill Country and south Texas in late March 1864, I've been through enough floods to extrapolate.

From San Antonio proper to Helotes, the terrain beneath the asphalt and years of brush spread by domestic livestock and fire suppression is all open, rolling hills, at one time covered with rich nutritious mesquite grass and mottes of live oaks. Past Helotes, the Hill Country starts, high sculpted hills with cedar (as we call ash juniper) clinging to thin soil over limestone, cut by frequent creeks. The air, when you get far enough away from the internal combustion engine, has a distinct aroma, partly a generic "country" smell that anyone from Iowa would recognize, but with a spicy undertone that I don't think is the cedar, but might be. The term "spicy" is used by travel writers of the 19th century, too, so whatever generates it, it is native.

A picnic in Bandera's city park on the Medina River rewarded me with several cypresses plenty old enough to have been there when Len would have been. The bridge swallows in Bandera build rough pebbly nests not at all like the firm clay ones under San Antonio bridges, and I didn't see a single heron. Nor did I see any fish in the river, but one of the decaying cypresses had boards nailed on it that could most parsimoniously be explained as a seat for fishermen, and a dead alligator gar was washed up on a sandbank near the bridge, so I expect that was a function of the time of day.

The Frontier Times Museum has the virtues and the defects of the local museum. Founded as it was by J. Marvin Hunter, Bandera County's most dedicated historian and founding editor/publisher of Frontier Times, it is larger and more coherent than a lot of them, with a purpose-built building erected in 1930. History is literally built-in, with the fossil-studded central fireplace sporting a millwheel cemented into its mantelpiece: the very same millwheel that washed out of a mill on the Pedernales, that Mormon leader Lyman Wight saw in a vision and went out to retrieve. Not only that, but an Indian mano or grinding stone is inserted into the axle hole. Everybody in the county who had anything remotely interesting deposited it at the museum when they couldn't keep it anymore, from taxidermied animals to a huge collection of bells, from a comforter spun, dyed (with elderberries; a beautiful blue in a complex check pattern called "Snail Trail and Cat Track"), and woven at home to a shrunken head; from a Civil War era rag doll to a picture of John Wesley Hardin's corpse.

Therein, of course, lies the weakness; despite the general Western theme, a lot of "cabinet of curiosities" stuff (dressed fleas), exotic items, and personal-interest collections with little provenance are included. Not everything is labeled, and some of the labeling is inadequate, with "x number of years ago" and "very old" used instead of dates. The large collection of books is all under glass, which is just as well as most of them are falling apart; but that means if the title isn't clear and there's no label, or you can't tell which book a label refers to, you're out of luck. Still, it was possible to get a fair idea of what sort of books the pioneers of Bandera had available - lots of religious tracts, a tiny Iliad, Burns, McGuffey readers, arithmetic books developed in England and printed in New York, Luther Bibles and King James Bibles, Webster's Dictionary, a French book detailing the names, life stories, and associated flowers of each saint for each day of the year.

I saw first-issue Confederate money (I suspect that second issue money never made it as far as Bandera), shinplasters, and one-cent pieces from the 50s, but no Mexican gold or silver older than 1883. Oh, well, I can find books about that. Amasa Clark's camel-hair pillow is on display; so is the shawl which Annie Schickenden wore when she sang for the King and Queen of Prussia, and brought with her when she came to Texas in 1846. Where else would I see those?

I also brought in my Peterson and compared it to a taxidermy display of the birds of Mason County. (I guess there wasn't a Mason County museum when the person who stuffed these died and his grandchildren had to decide what to do with them; or maybe the taxidermist was a friend of Hunter's. You can't think to ask everything!) Now I know regional names for the lesser goldfinch (Mexican canary or Arkansas goldfinch), Bullock's oriole (Texas oriole), kestrel (blue darter sparrowhawk), and summer tanager (redbird). That Mexican canary answers a long-standing question. Wild-caught "canaries" used to be routinely sold in straw cages San Antonio markets, as pets, and I've always wondered what species this might be. So now I know!

Wonderful opportunities lie in the collection, as the staff will tell you. A diary sits in one case, written by some nameless person in New York in 1835-37. It was bought in an antique store in San Antonio in 1916, where it no doubt landed because it mentions the fall of the Alamo. I asked if it had ever been transcribed, and was told no, but not because they don't want it to be! Transcribing is hard, time-consuming work and volunteers can only do so much. If I ever write a story set in that time period, and no one has gotten to it, I may do it myself; until then, I can't spare the time from the rest of my life. She's hoping to lure a graduate student into the job.

The sole staff member on duty that day, whose name I'm afraid I never asked (she never asked mine either, but I don't think that makes us even because I doubt she's blogging about me), was extremely helpful. She took the rag doll, fragile as it was, out of its case to be photographed, and she knew where "the Slide-off" is - the hill where, do what they would, the shingle-makers who founded the town always lost the top of their load when they took their shingles in to San Antonio to sell. She also gave me directions to the oldest building in town, currently under renovation.

Huffmeyer's Store on Main claims to be the oldest, but it wasn't built until 1874, and a block beyond is 11th street, the actual first street in town. I took a picture of a real estate office which claimed to have been built in 1860 and operated as a home, store, school, and first bank in Bandera (banking was illegal in Texas until Reconstruction; this explains much of our economic history); but the oldest building in town stands at the corner of Cypress and 11th. It's a limestone building with a gallery, once covered with a coat of stucco, and currently in the revealing disarray of restoration. It looks to me as though its two rooms were built at two different times - the limestone blocks are different - and with the stucco mostly worn off and windows glassless you can see, even from the street, how the wooden frames were fitted and the windows arranged to catch the breeze. Across the street is a sharp drop-off into a lot full of trees and cedar waxwings; beyond that lot, I almost immediately came to the tourist cottages on the edge of the park where I picnicked. The builder chose the best spot in town - a view of what would have been the ford of the Medina, but well out of the flood plain. Our Texas summers would have been relieved by the position of the house and gallery relative to the prevailing breeze, while the northers would have been closed out with shutters and the thick stuccoed limestone blocks. Who needs central heat and air?

At the library, a beautiful well-designed building, they told me that the historical marker I'd failed to find as I came into town was Polly's Chapel, and it was well off the main road. I had turned back when I drove for a while on a road that got ever narrower, thinking I'd missed the marker and was heading into somebody's ranch; and they said you did feel that way getting there, and to just keep going. So on the way back I tried again.

If I had known in detail what the route was like, I probably wouldn't have gone; and wouldn't that have been a shame? If you are ever in the Bandera vicinity and want to visit Polly's Chapel, you should turn off at the Historical Marker sign, on Privilege Creek Road. Follow Privilege Creek Road, at 30 MPH or less, through all its many lane-and-a-half windings, being prepared to pull over and creep past any of the people who live back there on their way out. Be polite and wait your turn at the narrow bridge over Privilege Creek - watch for killdeer. Drive right on through the cattle guard at the sign that warns: "Loose livestock" and onto the gravel road. If you don't mind the dust you raise (the slower you go the less dust) this is a beautiful stretch of road, parallelling the creek, which at this point is lined on the opposite bank with steep limestone cliffs. The first fork you come to won't confuse you as it will have a sign saying "Polly's Chapel" pointing straight over the ford.

Yes, you will have to drive through Privilege Creek. Don't do this if the water is at all high! Moby has a low undercarriage, but we got through all right. On the other side you'll soon come to another cattle guard, and right past it there's another sign for the Chapel, pointing you to a two-rut road with a slight grade on one side and cedar and live oak scrub all around. If you meet somebody coming out, one of you will have to back up. That's all there is to it.

But the chapel clearing is beautiful and peaceful (except for the sound of destruction equipment beeping and roaring somewhere - the terrible thing is that the country is so beautiful, everybody wants to live there, but they can't live there without dragging the city after them), and the chapel itself is a tiny gem. Policarpo Rodriguez, one of the most interesting men to ever live in Bandera County, built it himself out of limestone blocks after he got religion of the Protestant kind in 1878. The date on the cornerstone is 1882, too late for me; but that's okay. It's in use today, with electricity, an acoustical tile ceiling, picnic tables, and a garden-shed-sized restroom building out back. Lots of tempting trails lead into the live oak/cedar brush, but I restrained myself and did a single circuit of the clearing. Most of the birds eluded me, as they always do in this sort of terrain; but that's all right. The birds are an excuse to go to places like this. One bird I thought was going to be a mocker showed me a head like a chickadee, then vanished, so that's my big birding mystery for the trip.

I saved one shot in the disposable camera (I'd have a digital one by now if I hadn't driven into that light pole) to take the view from the Slide-Off; but when I got there I didn't think it wise to stop. Another time, perhaps. After all, I might not even use this location.

Next week, if all goes well, I'll scout Medina County.