Hello to Kerrville

It's now been nine years since I lived in Texas, and another one probably since I visited Kerrville, my favorite place in Texas. I have only good memories of Kerrville.

Kerrville is home to the Kerrville Folk Festival, which is arguably the best folk festival in the US, certainly one of the biggest and longest-running. As a fiddler it was a joy to me to go and saw away with some Austin musicians who just happened to be there. Probably its best asset is that it's not far from Austin, and Austin is a place with way too many musicians, not enough for them to do in terms of well-paying gigs, and good reasons to flee the city (traffic, prices, stress, politics, etc.) which would make a fine musician want to go park in Kerrville for a while.

The Quiet Valley Ranch is not directly on the Guadelope River, and thus was spared from the most devastating impacts of the flood. At the ranch one can find a small core of dedicated people - dedicated to making one good festival once a year in May - and being nice to people the other eleven months of the year. It's a kind of counter-culture stopping-off point, a place for the young and others to find refuge from the mean and dirty world of Texas and the south - and, most amazingly, the swamps of east Texas and the scorching desert of San Antonio turn there, going west, into a hilly country that actually has a few lakes, not to mention the river, so that to some it's the prettiest part of Texas. To me it was, for sure, though I always liked the Panhandle too. But it crossed my mind, and that of others too - if I were to stay in Texas, and retire there, what better place than a hilly, cool place with lots of music all the time and especially once a year?

I never asked them, nor did I even meet the people who are more or less permanent at Quiet Valley. I heard a lot of good things about them - they are widely respected, and really nice - but they wouldn't know me from anyone. Some guy who played some wild fiddle one night in the camping area, and wore an old Texas Tech hat.

I had friends from Illinois, actually, who were devoted to the place, and would go down there every year. It was like that - the people who loved the place, really loved it.

Back to the flood. It turns out, what the ranch has that it can lend to rescuers and cleanup crews is RV hookups. That's what they have and that's what they offer. They of course know people all over Kerr County - know people who died, know people who are searching, know people who know things. They are good neighbors and well connected. To me, it's interesting to see it a little from their persepctive.

Grateful, again, that it is not me or mine that got swept away in that wall of water.

I just visited Lubbock, and was impressed by several things. There was actually a possibility that I would move there, given the fact that New Mexico, where I now live, has become unsustainable for family reasons. Certain family members have to find a place to live, and Lubbock was a possibility. We lived there 2012-2016, and I still have a fondness for the place.

First, as a city, it's incredibly manageable. It's easy to get around. It doesn't confuse you or get you lost much. When you have an address you can figure out where it is. It has everything but it's not too big. Well, not everything - no major-league baseball, for example, but Tech provides most of that excitement pretty well. And its airport is functional and accessible.

Second, my friends there are still close friends. Something about the ultraconservative nature of it makes it so all of us in the "other" category have a lot in common. And they have stayed friends even over the five or six years we have been gone.

My joke as a musician went something like this: Person 1: "Lubbock is so hot, and dry, and dusty, and flat, and miserable, about all you can do is sit around playing music." Person 2: "Yeah, that's what I like about it."

My autobiography & more

http://tlevspress.blogspot.com/2021/09/just-passing-through.html

Lubbock and the covid

I always knew Lubbock had an attitude, and I loved Lubbock anyway. I knew that it was one of the only big cities in the US to consistently vote Republican - it is so conservative that even the poor city folk vote Republican. Or at least they don't vote Democrat. In any case, it's one red town, bless its heart.

Well with the COVID it's been deemed one of the worst. It has a bad combination of situations - students who come and go from around the country, if not the world, a government that is not inclined to put any restrictions on business whatsoever, and people who in general value money more than safety. It doesn't seem to me that it's necessarily a "Republican" thing to avoid wearing masks, and to in general discount the severity of the virus. But it has kind of worked out that way, that Lubbock is right in line with that kind of general sentiment, and as a result it is "one of the worst."

Unlike the rest of Texas, Lubbock, along with Amarillo, actually gets something of a winter. The winds blow hard and cold; there is dust everywhere; people go inside a lot. Winter is actually kind of nice in Lubbock. You get the feeling of winter, and a little bit of the snow, without too much of the inconvenience. One winter it snowed a lot, snowed hard, right before the new year, when we were coming out to New Mexico. Here in the mountains of New Mexico it snowed maybe fourteen inches, and the plows were right on it; they had it cleared off, and people were driving in it. Back in Lubbock, where they'd had maybe only four inches, they still hadn't plowed it when we went back. Someone told me they only had one plow in the city, so they just did the main roads. They don't do the residential streets, they said, because people complain about the piles of snow blocking their driveway, and nobody owns a shovel.

Well it's kind of like the hurricanes in Florida after a while. One side of me says, you knew what you were getting into, you knew this wasn't safe. You vote for Trump, people are going to die. You wreck the environment, the environment will come around and wreck you back.

I don't think Trump intentionally set out to kill those quarter million people. It just happened. It's like Yellow House Canyon. It will go down in history, and future generations might not even know what I'm talking about. The winds that rake across the plains, maybe they'll remember.

Hands Off That Pear

Hands Off That Pear

& 23 other short stories
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more coming!

e pluribus haiku 2017

a thousand original haiku

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Those of you who know the Tech Terrace neighborhood may recognize the cover photo...

Mannequin Challenge

& 20 short stories you can't put down

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