So, yesterday the author sessions I attended at the Texas Book Festival both dealt at some level with memory. Guadalupe Garcia McCall talked about how she wrote the poem that eventually burgeoned into Under the Mesquite, showing her class of skeptical 13-year olds (I think it was 13-year olds) how easy it is to get a subject for a poem. First, she tapped a memory - the first one that came to mind, since she was under the gun - and then when she had it she had them time her and, just as they'd dared her, she wrote a poem in under five minutes. And then eventually she had to go deeper and deeper and deeper into memory, to places she didn't want to go, in order to write the book, which also finally enabled her to come to terms with her mother's death.
In the session on "Sense of Birthplace," Beatriz de la Garza was talking about how a trunk of family papers was her way in to the history of the Republic of the Rio Grande, and Sarah Cortez was wildly enthusiastic about memoir and how we use it to understand one another across our various identity boundaries.
Now, this is something I don't do. Okay, sure, I tap my memory all the time because in the end, what else do any of us have? But I've got personal memory and reading memory and listening memory all jumbled up. Everything goes into the pot and flavors everything else. I don't draw directly on my own particular memories until I need them in service to a story because I do not find myself interesting.
(It couldn't possibly be because there's things in my memory I don't want to think about and places I never want to go again. Nope, nope, nope. Not me. And anyway, when I need to go there to retrieve stuff for a story I'm already working on, I can do it, but going there to get a story? I'm not that desperate, thanks. The back door's my chosen route.)
And though I can pass on advice about using your own memory as a story source, it's not a suitable topic for a garage sale because it's not specific enough. Sure, I could give you a story seed based on one of my memories, but the whole strength of the technique is based on each of us going down our own personal memory lanes to retrieve our own strongest emotions.
Memory Lane. Now, that's an image. It's long (and gets longer as we age), and parts of it are very dark indeed but parts are all bright and sunny and we'd like to get to them. If we could do it without going through the dark parts.
What if you put a person onto her own memory lane for a story? Send her down a physical path that she gradually realizes is her own life?
Hm. That's not generating anything all by itself. You have to create the character before you can create the memory lane, and either trick her onto it or create a crisis that forces her down it, in order to have enough structure for a story. Because of course memory isn't structured at all. It isn't even chronological. When you go down memory lane, you carom from memory to memory, from last year to high school to college to junior high to your first time in a wading pool by association. Even if it's a magic realist story, you need more structure than that.
And I don't know about you, but I prefer stories with multiple characters. The opportunities for dynamic interaction with the people in your memory are limited. Maybe you can understand your mother, or your bully, or your ex, now with the benefit of hindsight, but you can't communicate that understanding to your previous self and you can't change your past behavior toward them any more than you can change their behavior toward you.
So what if you're going down somebody else's memory lane? And can interact with her fruitfully while there?
What if a child, or grandchild, or a caregiver (who became a caregiver because she had this talent) has to go down the memory lane of someone with a memory malfunctioning due to age and/or illness? What if someone you love is lost in a maze of memories and you go in after her, to take her by the hand and lead her back to the present?
Can you face what you'd learn about her, doing this? Can you face what you'd learn about yourself?
And how do you avoid making this a silly fantasy about using your magic talent to cure Alzheimer's or something sentimental like that?
Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maps. Show all posts
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Thursday, November 18, 2010
In Common With Greatness
Ursula LeGuin's Lavinia is so good I didn't even feel my mind being blown until afterward. LeGuin does that to me sometimes. But that's not what I came to talk to you about.
In the Afterward, she talks about research. Other things, too, but mostly research. She describes how her puzzlement over the geography of the Aeneid was relieved when a friend of hers, described as a "geomancer," showed her maps from the Grande Carte Stradale d'Italia on which she could find her way around it in the modern world. "There, in large scale, near Croce di Solferato, is Vergil's Albunea, properly convenient to Laurentium; and there it is, Rio Torto, the river that must have been Numicus...It was deeply touching to me to find these places of legend on a highway map of the Touring Club Italiano. On the map and in the myth, they are real." She also geeks out over a book published in the 1930s, Vergil's Latium, by Bertha Tilly, who took a walking tour of relevant sites with a Brownie camera.
And I said: "Yes." I am not in LeGuin's league and won't pretend to be, but we have this in common, the indescribable orgasmic sweetness of doing the research and diving into the real world and finding the story incarnated there, organic, interdependent and now all you have to do is write the thing.
I have no patience with people who say "It's only a story" and just make things up, taking the easy way. They're cheating themselves out of joy.
Worse, they're cheating the story.
In the Afterward, she talks about research. Other things, too, but mostly research. She describes how her puzzlement over the geography of the Aeneid was relieved when a friend of hers, described as a "geomancer," showed her maps from the Grande Carte Stradale d'Italia on which she could find her way around it in the modern world. "There, in large scale, near Croce di Solferato, is Vergil's Albunea, properly convenient to Laurentium; and there it is, Rio Torto, the river that must have been Numicus...It was deeply touching to me to find these places of legend on a highway map of the Touring Club Italiano. On the map and in the myth, they are real." She also geeks out over a book published in the 1930s, Vergil's Latium, by Bertha Tilly, who took a walking tour of relevant sites with a Brownie camera.
And I said: "Yes." I am not in LeGuin's league and won't pretend to be, but we have this in common, the indescribable orgasmic sweetness of doing the research and diving into the real world and finding the story incarnated there, organic, interdependent and now all you have to do is write the thing.
I have no patience with people who say "It's only a story" and just make things up, taking the easy way. They're cheating themselves out of joy.
Worse, they're cheating the story.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Research Walk
Yesterday, I got together my maps, my notebook, some fruit in an insulated bag, and a bottle of water, and I took the bus downtown to figure out where Di was living when Len came to town.
See, I had picked Yturri Street because of its proximity to the cotton yards; but I realized that Yturri (a short street in the middle of the bend in the river, comprising an area analogous to St. Mary's Street between Commerce and the old library) would have been part of the area devastated by the flood of March 26, 1865. According to the two and a half columns of coverage in the April 7 Semi-Weekly News, the "freshets of March 26" were a disaster - families homeless, merchandise destroyed, property lost or injured in areas never flooded before, and loss of life.
Mind you, it's difficult for a modern researcher to be sure where this devastation lay. The report printed in the Semi-Weekly News describes the hardest-hit areas as
As it happens, I know where Nat Lewis's mill was. Not only is it commemorated by one of the Riverwalk's tile historical markers and noted on one of my maps, but I used to work for the local utility company, constructed on what was once known as Bowen's Island near the ford where the mill was located. I remember when Betty Farlow put together a display about the history of the site for the company, back in the 80s. She could never interest the corporation in producing a proper historical booklet, but she did enough work to have written one and would pour her findings into my sympathetic and interested ear at lunch. So I know about the mill, the ford, the Turnverein, the nude bathing off the bridge - the works. But Giddings, Herff, and Simpson are, if not strangers to me (certainly not Giddings, operator of the Jackass Mail), not people I'm on visiting terms with.
Still, Bowen's Island is adjacent to Yturri Street and Main is a couple of blocks west of it, so I would either have to choose another street or enter the complication that when Len goes to the address she has for Di, in order to inform her of her father's death, neither Di nor her house will be there. I chose the complication because, face it, everybody gets lost their first time in San Antonio. I'm not sure how to make this into a way to advance the plot, but that's the sort of thing I can figure out as I go. First thing's first: find where Di and the Middletons moved to, and figure out how hard it will be to track them down.
So off I went, tramping through the streets, map in hand, constantly comparing it to the existing streets. In a couple of places I found helpful historical markers - at the German-English School and at the site of Guenther's Upper Mill - that made it easier to peel back the layers of time to the right year. At the Upper Mill, for example, I found that the mill wouldn't have been there - since Mauermann made his map in 1868, it shows features that wouldn't have existed three years earlier, and this is one of them. The mill was razed for river widening in 1924 - so this tells me not only that the map is "wrong" on this point, but that the river I see today is wider than the river Len will see if she has occasion to go that far south. But wait, there's more! Set into the ground a few yards from the mill marker are a couple of stones, marked "Stribling House 1859-1926;" and between them is a huge black walnut tree. So - no mill, but a substantial house with a stone foundation where the owner has planted a black walnut!
I am tolerably familiar with downtown San Antonio. I lived there, in a now-gone apartment across the street from the Southwest Craft Center and the former KMOL studios (now WOAI-TV) for the crucial years between dropping out of Trinity University and moving in with Damon. Most of the jobs I've had, temporary or permanent, were downtown. When a convention I'm interested in comes to town, like ALA, TLA, or IRA, it's in the convention center across from the German English school. And when visitors come to town, I'm their native guide. I've even done walking research there before, in order to see what Ada and Amber saw when they switched places across time in Switching Well. I can tell you ghost stories, history stories, movie stories, any kind of story you'd like about the heart of San Antonio - and still, the light bulbs kept coming on over my head as I realized - oh, that's what they did with that street; oh, this is where I am; oh, here's where that was.
I never realized before that the famous Market House, a honey of a building cooled by fountains and designed to look like a massive Greek temple, was built on the flood channel. It hadn't struck me that either the old cathedral had to be oriented differently from the new one, or that parishioners had to cross the Main Acequia to get in the front door. I hadn't noticed that Dolorosa Street, rather than turning into Market Street, becomes the sidewalk in front of the courthouse and continues as that little alley behind the old library.
And I finally realize just how wrongheaded it was to continue the line of Navarro Street as South St. Mary's; requiring, as it did, that St. Mary's Street be laid out to turn sharply eastward (about in line with the old bend in the river that delineated Bowen's Island) in order to join up with an existing street that continued the line of Navarro (only it wasn't Navarro at that point; it was Paso). For years I've been repeating the local story blaming St. Mary's Street's bewildering layout - running north, south, east, and west all in the course of a single mile - on the burro drivers who fell asleep on their way home and let the animals find their own way; but in this part of town, at least, blame must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the city engineers.
I'm not going to lay it all out for you in tedious detail. This is sort of place geekery should be done in person, and if you ever want a native guide to San Antonio, give me a call - we're in the book. It's enough to know that I understand the town I love better, and I found exactly the right neighborhood and type of house the Middletons and Di will relocate to, at exorbitant rent, after the flood. I also know exactly where the Plaza Hotel was, where the James Vance family lived (historical marker - corner of modern Nueva and S. Main, then Nueva and Acequia streets, only Acequia didn't run that far) and have a good sense of the cotton yards. I still need to locate some livery stables, an office for Julian Middleton, and no doubt other sites I don't know about yet.
But I know enough to get Len well and truly lost, and that'll do to go on with. It was an excellent morning's work (do not ever devote a summer afternoon to a research walk in San Antonio if you value your health!) and I wrote a fair amount today. I look forward to doing it again.
And again.
And again.
See, I had picked Yturri Street because of its proximity to the cotton yards; but I realized that Yturri (a short street in the middle of the bend in the river, comprising an area analogous to St. Mary's Street between Commerce and the old library) would have been part of the area devastated by the flood of March 26, 1865. According to the two and a half columns of coverage in the April 7 Semi-Weekly News, the "freshets of March 26" were a disaster - families homeless, merchandise destroyed, property lost or injured in areas never flooded before, and loss of life.
Mind you, it's difficult for a modern researcher to be sure where this devastation lay. The report printed in the Semi-Weekly News describes the hardest-hit areas as
running across the bend of the river, one from above Mr. Simpson's house to the rear of Dr. Herff's house, which proved so destructive, and the other from about Mr. Gidding's house to Nat Lewis's mill, across Main Street.
As it happens, I know where Nat Lewis's mill was. Not only is it commemorated by one of the Riverwalk's tile historical markers and noted on one of my maps, but I used to work for the local utility company, constructed on what was once known as Bowen's Island near the ford where the mill was located. I remember when Betty Farlow put together a display about the history of the site for the company, back in the 80s. She could never interest the corporation in producing a proper historical booklet, but she did enough work to have written one and would pour her findings into my sympathetic and interested ear at lunch. So I know about the mill, the ford, the Turnverein, the nude bathing off the bridge - the works. But Giddings, Herff, and Simpson are, if not strangers to me (certainly not Giddings, operator of the Jackass Mail), not people I'm on visiting terms with.
Still, Bowen's Island is adjacent to Yturri Street and Main is a couple of blocks west of it, so I would either have to choose another street or enter the complication that when Len goes to the address she has for Di, in order to inform her of her father's death, neither Di nor her house will be there. I chose the complication because, face it, everybody gets lost their first time in San Antonio. I'm not sure how to make this into a way to advance the plot, but that's the sort of thing I can figure out as I go. First thing's first: find where Di and the Middletons moved to, and figure out how hard it will be to track them down.
So off I went, tramping through the streets, map in hand, constantly comparing it to the existing streets. In a couple of places I found helpful historical markers - at the German-English School and at the site of Guenther's Upper Mill - that made it easier to peel back the layers of time to the right year. At the Upper Mill, for example, I found that the mill wouldn't have been there - since Mauermann made his map in 1868, it shows features that wouldn't have existed three years earlier, and this is one of them. The mill was razed for river widening in 1924 - so this tells me not only that the map is "wrong" on this point, but that the river I see today is wider than the river Len will see if she has occasion to go that far south. But wait, there's more! Set into the ground a few yards from the mill marker are a couple of stones, marked "Stribling House 1859-1926;" and between them is a huge black walnut tree. So - no mill, but a substantial house with a stone foundation where the owner has planted a black walnut!
I am tolerably familiar with downtown San Antonio. I lived there, in a now-gone apartment across the street from the Southwest Craft Center and the former KMOL studios (now WOAI-TV) for the crucial years between dropping out of Trinity University and moving in with Damon. Most of the jobs I've had, temporary or permanent, were downtown. When a convention I'm interested in comes to town, like ALA, TLA, or IRA, it's in the convention center across from the German English school. And when visitors come to town, I'm their native guide. I've even done walking research there before, in order to see what Ada and Amber saw when they switched places across time in Switching Well. I can tell you ghost stories, history stories, movie stories, any kind of story you'd like about the heart of San Antonio - and still, the light bulbs kept coming on over my head as I realized - oh, that's what they did with that street; oh, this is where I am; oh, here's where that was.
I never realized before that the famous Market House, a honey of a building cooled by fountains and designed to look like a massive Greek temple, was built on the flood channel. It hadn't struck me that either the old cathedral had to be oriented differently from the new one, or that parishioners had to cross the Main Acequia to get in the front door. I hadn't noticed that Dolorosa Street, rather than turning into Market Street, becomes the sidewalk in front of the courthouse and continues as that little alley behind the old library.
And I finally realize just how wrongheaded it was to continue the line of Navarro Street as South St. Mary's; requiring, as it did, that St. Mary's Street be laid out to turn sharply eastward (about in line with the old bend in the river that delineated Bowen's Island) in order to join up with an existing street that continued the line of Navarro (only it wasn't Navarro at that point; it was Paso). For years I've been repeating the local story blaming St. Mary's Street's bewildering layout - running north, south, east, and west all in the course of a single mile - on the burro drivers who fell asleep on their way home and let the animals find their own way; but in this part of town, at least, blame must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the city engineers.
I'm not going to lay it all out for you in tedious detail. This is sort of place geekery should be done in person, and if you ever want a native guide to San Antonio, give me a call - we're in the book. It's enough to know that I understand the town I love better, and I found exactly the right neighborhood and type of house the Middletons and Di will relocate to, at exorbitant rent, after the flood. I also know exactly where the Plaza Hotel was, where the James Vance family lived (historical marker - corner of modern Nueva and S. Main, then Nueva and Acequia streets, only Acequia didn't run that far) and have a good sense of the cotton yards. I still need to locate some livery stables, an office for Julian Middleton, and no doubt other sites I don't know about yet.
But I know enough to get Len well and truly lost, and that'll do to go on with. It was an excellent morning's work (do not ever devote a summer afternoon to a research walk in San Antonio if you value your health!) and I wrote a fair amount today. I look forward to doing it again.
And again.
And again.
Thursday, May 6, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Overpreparation
It is a fixed principle of mine that a sufficient amount of overpreparation guarantees a smoothly-running trip. That's why my backpack is already loaded with trail mix and apples, a notebook, printed notes, maps, walking shows, socks, binoculars, digital camera, a guidebook, and a bird book; why I baked two loaves of bread to be sure of having one decent low-sodium sandwich; why there's a bottle of water in the freezer this minute; why Moby (an old-fashioned car) has his CD changer filled with road music, mostly the 70s rock/pop that I find most conducive to a relaxed central Texas Drie, but also the essential Melissa Etheridge, who tends to pop up on random play at the very moment she's needed (I swear her cover of "Piece of My Heart" saved both our lives one time) to see me through tricky bits of driving. I'll probably lay my clothes out tonight to make it easier to get up in time to have breakfast and brew a big travel mug of tea, take my husband to work, and get on my way.
I've spent a good bit of the last two days working back and forth between maps, and been unable to determine exactly where people hit town coming in from Bandera. Fredericksburg Road and Castroville Road are indicated on the city maps, but though the mid-19th century county map shows Bandera Road going more or less straight into town, the scale on that one is too small to see where, and the city maps don't show anything. My working assumption is that some approximation of Fredericksburg Road/Culebra Road/Bandera Road defines the historic route, and that San Pedro Springs/Five Points would be the psychological equivalent of hitting Loop 1604 - not there yet, but close enough to count as "coming into town" rather than "going to town." I'm hoping to find something in Bandera that can tweak this for me.
Of course, I may decide Len comes into town via Castroville. I'll have to do this all over again for that trip. And if I decide that I need to camp overnight and ride horseback at Hill Country Natural Area to get a proper sense of how she experienced the terrain - the overpreparation I do for a camping trip is tiring to think about!
Feel free to make fun of me if you want. Overpreparation the day before puts me in a zen state on the day, and when unexpected things happen - when the car breaks down 50 miles from the middle of nowhere (I don't have a cell phone); when the librarian who organized the school visit goes into labor the day before my school visit and no one knows what's going on when I show up; when the players do something completely off-the-wall and the dice perform statistically improbable feats, sending the adventure careening off the map - I'll be able to cope. It never fails. If I haven't covered every possible base beforehand, it's even odds I'll fall apart.
Nobody wants me to fall apart. I'm a dangerous nuisance when shattered across the landscape.
I've spent a good bit of the last two days working back and forth between maps, and been unable to determine exactly where people hit town coming in from Bandera. Fredericksburg Road and Castroville Road are indicated on the city maps, but though the mid-19th century county map shows Bandera Road going more or less straight into town, the scale on that one is too small to see where, and the city maps don't show anything. My working assumption is that some approximation of Fredericksburg Road/Culebra Road/Bandera Road defines the historic route, and that San Pedro Springs/Five Points would be the psychological equivalent of hitting Loop 1604 - not there yet, but close enough to count as "coming into town" rather than "going to town." I'm hoping to find something in Bandera that can tweak this for me.
Of course, I may decide Len comes into town via Castroville. I'll have to do this all over again for that trip. And if I decide that I need to camp overnight and ride horseback at Hill Country Natural Area to get a proper sense of how she experienced the terrain - the overpreparation I do for a camping trip is tiring to think about!
Feel free to make fun of me if you want. Overpreparation the day before puts me in a zen state on the day, and when unexpected things happen - when the car breaks down 50 miles from the middle of nowhere (I don't have a cell phone); when the librarian who organized the school visit goes into labor the day before my school visit and no one knows what's going on when I show up; when the players do something completely off-the-wall and the dice perform statistically improbable feats, sending the adventure careening off the map - I'll be able to cope. It never fails. If I haven't covered every possible base beforehand, it's even odds I'll fall apart.
Nobody wants me to fall apart. I'm a dangerous nuisance when shattered across the landscape.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Reading Old Maps
The Texana room at the Enchilada, where I'm reading the Civil War Semi-Weekly News, is closed on Mondays, so instead I walked across downtown (on the Riverwalk; not a hardship) to the San Antonio Conservation Society to raid their library for maps. I wasn't very hopeful about this, as I remembered from researching Switching Well that the yearly updating of city maps is a new thing and that the best I'd probably be able to do was get maps that bracketed my time; but in fact their catalog yielded quite a few possibilities.
Maps, like other research materials, are created for purposes not necessarily related to those of the individual researcher. One map I looked at showed few to no geographical features, but consisted entirely of the puzzle pieces of survey plats. A godsend for certain kinds of research; useless to me. One, combining data from an 1868, an 1899, and a 1965 map, was primarily intended to show the locations of vanished businesses and landmarks, such as the Bat Cave (as we called the insecure jail/courthouse of most of the 19th century) and Wm. Gamble's bookstore, in relation to the 20th-century downtown. So it'll be excellent for my location scouting, in one respect; but misleading in another, as it shows modern streets - notably Houston - that didn't exist in my time period, and limited in another, as it doesn't even show all of downtown. The map that shows me the mid-nineteenth century districts or wards of the city doesn't show all the street names. And so on.
The great find of the day was a 1924 blueprint copy of "The City of San Antonio, made in 1868 and 1869 by stepping by A.J. Mauermann." It's confusing at first, because he put east at the top; but once you get oriented this is the bomb! In addition to labeling the river, streets, acequias, and plazas, he's drawn in all the buildings, with the most important ones (churches, schools, gas factory, ice factory, mills, hotels, Ernst's Restaurant) labeled, and at least some of the footbridges. Apparently we had a "Dutch Windmill" back in the day. The flow of natural waterways is shown by arrows. Some of the streets are delineated with solid and some with dotted lines, and some with both, which I interpret to refer to the degree to which they are maintained. Best of all are the notations in what would otherwise be open space. "Mesquite." "Cotton Yard." "Cane for Fishing Poles." "Water Melon Field." "Here on this Plain Gen. Sheridan held a Review over 25,000 Cavalry Men to Go to Mexico 1865."
The entire town is not covered - I'll need to cross-reference this map with the one showing the wards - but Mr. Mauermann helpfully drew in arrows to the places he regarded as important. "On Sunday, to San Pedro Springs" (shown in an inset). To the Laurel Hills, to Jonas Beer Garden, to Dignowity Hill, to Powder House, to Cemetery. You can also see what roads would be taken out of town to get to various places - El Paso, Indianola, Seguin, Castroville - and thus, which is what I care about, which roads to take into town from these places.
I always long for overlay maps in these situations. You remember those diagrams of animals you used to find in biology and zoology books, with the outline of the frog or human or whatever on the paper page and a series of clear, stiff pages showing the circulatory system in red, the nerves in blue, the muscles in artistically striated pink, so you can lay them on top of one another in order to see the systems you're interested in relate to each other without interference from the others? Maps should be like that. I want to be able to see the whole city, 1865 in one view, 2010 in another, now all the buildings from this period, now let's look at the bridges, now I need the street names. Nobody makes these. I can't imagine why not (labor and expense being negligible concerns). You could do it digitally and it'd be so cool! Digitally you could blow it up to different scales, too, focus on a single street or the entire town or back up to Bexar County, each of the adjacent counties, now look at the geography, now see the names of propery owners...
Okay, so, I'll never get that. I'll either have to cross reference between maps constantly while writing, or do my own cobbled-together version, with mapping software if I can find one that does what I need or, more probably, hand drawn with numerous scale imperfections. I'm not good at translating what I see into what I draw, as anyone who's tried to read my maps of archeological units will concede. Like the song says, you can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes, you'll get what you need.
So thank you, Mr. Mauermann!
Maps, like other research materials, are created for purposes not necessarily related to those of the individual researcher. One map I looked at showed few to no geographical features, but consisted entirely of the puzzle pieces of survey plats. A godsend for certain kinds of research; useless to me. One, combining data from an 1868, an 1899, and a 1965 map, was primarily intended to show the locations of vanished businesses and landmarks, such as the Bat Cave (as we called the insecure jail/courthouse of most of the 19th century) and Wm. Gamble's bookstore, in relation to the 20th-century downtown. So it'll be excellent for my location scouting, in one respect; but misleading in another, as it shows modern streets - notably Houston - that didn't exist in my time period, and limited in another, as it doesn't even show all of downtown. The map that shows me the mid-nineteenth century districts or wards of the city doesn't show all the street names. And so on.
The great find of the day was a 1924 blueprint copy of "The City of San Antonio, made in 1868 and 1869 by stepping by A.J. Mauermann." It's confusing at first, because he put east at the top; but once you get oriented this is the bomb! In addition to labeling the river, streets, acequias, and plazas, he's drawn in all the buildings, with the most important ones (churches, schools, gas factory, ice factory, mills, hotels, Ernst's Restaurant) labeled, and at least some of the footbridges. Apparently we had a "Dutch Windmill" back in the day. The flow of natural waterways is shown by arrows. Some of the streets are delineated with solid and some with dotted lines, and some with both, which I interpret to refer to the degree to which they are maintained. Best of all are the notations in what would otherwise be open space. "Mesquite." "Cotton Yard." "Cane for Fishing Poles." "Water Melon Field." "Here on this Plain Gen. Sheridan held a Review over 25,000 Cavalry Men to Go to Mexico 1865."
The entire town is not covered - I'll need to cross-reference this map with the one showing the wards - but Mr. Mauermann helpfully drew in arrows to the places he regarded as important. "On Sunday, to San Pedro Springs" (shown in an inset). To the Laurel Hills, to Jonas Beer Garden, to Dignowity Hill, to Powder House, to Cemetery. You can also see what roads would be taken out of town to get to various places - El Paso, Indianola, Seguin, Castroville - and thus, which is what I care about, which roads to take into town from these places.
I always long for overlay maps in these situations. You remember those diagrams of animals you used to find in biology and zoology books, with the outline of the frog or human or whatever on the paper page and a series of clear, stiff pages showing the circulatory system in red, the nerves in blue, the muscles in artistically striated pink, so you can lay them on top of one another in order to see the systems you're interested in relate to each other without interference from the others? Maps should be like that. I want to be able to see the whole city, 1865 in one view, 2010 in another, now all the buildings from this period, now let's look at the bridges, now I need the street names. Nobody makes these. I can't imagine why not (labor and expense being negligible concerns). You could do it digitally and it'd be so cool! Digitally you could blow it up to different scales, too, focus on a single street or the entire town or back up to Bexar County, each of the adjacent counties, now look at the geography, now see the names of propery owners...
Okay, so, I'll never get that. I'll either have to cross reference between maps constantly while writing, or do my own cobbled-together version, with mapping software if I can find one that does what I need or, more probably, hand drawn with numerous scale imperfections. I'm not good at translating what I see into what I draw, as anyone who's tried to read my maps of archeological units will concede. Like the song says, you can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes, you'll get what you need.
So thank you, Mr. Mauermann!
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