Foilage?

A Drive in the Country

On October 23, Barbara and I were fortunate enough to be able to take a day and half drive out into the Texas Hill Country, southwest of Austin, and northwest of San Antone. The plan was to have a nice hike through the Lost Maples Preserve area, look for turning leaves, kick a few rocks, get the cobwebs and Wall Street worries out of out heads and breathe some fresh air. On a beautiful Thursday afternoon, we fired up the GPS in the Honda and headed that general direction.

After several miles and a little over an hour or so, we found ourselves almost lost (I swear that woman whose voice is on the GPS is Republican…she lied to us more than once) somewhere around Blanco, Texas. Therefore, what ensued was classic: I wanted to follow the map and my gut, Barbara wanted to stop and ask directions. My ego was completely against the “asking directions”thing (I had fallen for that Republican voice by now and of course knew what was best), but Barbara prevailed and we stopped at a local feed/hardware store. Barbara went inside and charmed the socks off of two “very nice young men”, and we wound up turning left, anyway. I think we both agreed not to disagree about that fracas any longer and on we went.

After another 25 miles or so we had gone from “OK” about food to Barbara needing a serious protein boost and I needed something more substantial than Gatorade and cashews. And we both needed a bathroom. Right about then, we entered Boerne, a quite little hamlet in the rolling hills of Texas, where we gambled on a left turn, not only to get us to the next highway we needed, but also in the hope that we might find a place to have dinner. As matters like this develop in Texas, we found a place for dinner before we had any reassurance about the requisite highway. “Y’all come back, y’ hear?”

What we found, on Main Street (marked “Haupstrasse” on the street sign) was the Cypress Springs Café. “Fine Dining”, it said on the sign. We parked the car on Haupstrasse and went in.

A deceptively attractive and clearly underage blonde hostess let Barbara see a menu and Barbara quickly zeroed in on the rotisserie chicken and the something-crusted eggplant. We decided to stay, just as soon as we determined that we might use the restrooms (there was one of those signs on the front door about “Restrooms not open to the public”)

Dinner turned out to be quite good, despite being accompanied by our waiter/server, Chris. First of all, the hostess had apparently alerted Chris to the fact that Barbara had let it out that we were “traveling”. This, in turn, turned Chris into a one-man welcoming committee, purveyor of fine advice and grand inquisitor. If we had not ascertained this before, we were clearly foreigners, outsiders, non-local disturbances. All of this was fine, except that I must tell you that Chris was a young man who had a Texas drawl which was probably being discerned as far away as the Maryland shore, looked like he just fallen off of a John Deere tractor and was horribly, awfully and visibly uncomfortable dressed all in black: shoes, trousers and a shirt painfully buttoned right up to the neck. Just looking at him made me wince.

After asking about which part of Austin we had come from, where we going and would we like something to drink besides water, Chris actually did more an able job of making is feel welcome. (When we were safely gone, however, Barbara revealed that when Chris had asked if we had a place to stay, he might have been setting us up to be whisked off to local Bates motel, where we would be stabbed to death in the shower. Didn’t happen.) Perhaps most important of all, Chris gave us explicit directions about how to get on highway 46, west, which would eventually get us to Tarpley, though “I can’t say I’ve ever been to Tarpley, myself” (later on, we would come to discover that our young friend had no reason, really, to have ever visited Tarpley, anyway, because Tarpley is little more than a gas station with a post office, just down the road from bustling “Utopia”...and I’m not making this up). More important (but learnt too late) was that the right turn onto route 46 that we sought, was right at “the third stoplight, I think, right there at the Wendy’s”. Had we known that, we would have had chicken nuggets and fries for perhaps $7.00 instead of rotisserie chicken and eggplant for $32.00.

At this point, I should mention that all during the trips’ daylight hours, we were seeing an increasing abundance of “McCain/Palin” signs on fencepost and driveway gates, and nary an Obama sign anywhere. But when we left the Cypress Springs Café, and went to the car, to find route 46 and go on, after I unlocked the door on Barbara’s Accord, we stopped to give each other a hug, and as I looked over her shoulder, I saw it:

In the two matching display windows, in a clothing shop on the “Haupstrasse”, two doors down from the venerable Cypress Springs Café. John McCain was staring at me. A photograph of his oddly shaped (and by now familiar looking) face was gazing at me, from atop a mannequin, where it had been affixed, next to another mannequin, this one female, sporting a photo on top of Sarah Palin. A banner sprawled atop both windows proudly proclaimed:

“Behind every good man stands a good woman.”

As I urged Barbara to slowly turn and see what I had seen, I worried that she might faint from surprise, and then, simultaneously, I realized I was a stranger in a strange land and that I had left my passport and my travel papers back in Austin. We pulled away slowly, heading toward route 46, and kept checking the rear view mirror and looking over my shoulder the entire time.

Throughout the remainder of our trip, which was delightful, by the way, I could not shake the notion that, not only were those poor lost maples of Texas turning, but since someone could actually so brazenly and honestly fill two entire store windows on “Hauptsrasse” with that “good woman” beside that “good man” also turning was my stomach.