Texas Hill Country

Austin comes well recommended, by many people, with varying degrees of fervor, and nearly always with a mention of a place called Sixth Street. I took all of this to heart, filed it away for future reference, and left town eighteen minutes after the plane landed. Cities are by definition the most interesting places in the world; what is more convincing than a million people deciding to live in the same spot? But sometimes you have to leave a place to understand it.

I drove west because I wanted a vantage point. I wanted to see the Texas Hill Country with my own eyes, a place so crowded with history and myth that I had trouble picturing it. I checked into a hotel on the edge of Fredericksburg, a town founded by German immigrants in 1846, in the heart of the Hill Country. The streets were quiet and wet, with nobody walking about. The only place in town with a crowd was a Mexican restaurant.

“All the tables are filled. Twenty minutes?”

“I just need a drink.”

“The bar’s packed,” she said, sizing me up. “We have a stool back there.” She pointed toward the kitchen.

“Perfect,” I said, nodding to the kitchen help.

“Where you coming from?” asked the manager.

“Los Angeles.”

“Business?”

“I want to see Fredericksburg.”

“Fredericksburg?” She laughed on her way out of the kitchen. “Go to Austin. Sixth Street!”

The bartender asked if he could get me anything. I asked for his best tequila. He poured a Patrón for me, and one for himself. “What should I check out in Fredericksburg?” I asked. I already knew about the museums, the history, the German food.

“Go to Austin, man,” he said, setting down chips and more Patrón.

The manager came back in and smacked him on top of the head. “I don’t want you touching me like that anymore,” she said. He swatted back at her, casually. “You’re in America now,” she told him. “You can’t act like that. You’ll get fired.”

The chef walked up. “You ever had any of our shrimps?” He pronounced it shreemps.

“No, this is my first time here.”

“Make him some shrimps. This is the good stuff, from the Texas Gulf.”

“Thank you,” I said. “But a lot of ‘Gulf’ shrimp are really farmed in China. How do you know these came from the Gulf of Mexico?”

He brought me a plate. “It’s on the house. These are too big to be Chinese shrimps.” Shineese shreemps.

The alarm rang at four-thirty the next morning, and soon I was driving north. The Hill Country is the eastern edge of the Edwards Plateau, a vast limestone tableland where the Great Plains give way to the desert Southwest. It is dotted with ranches, live oaks and mesquite, stone quarries, and Texas prickly pear.

Because it was early, and I was surely the first car on this particular one-lane road, the white-tailed deer were out, along with cattle, sheep, raccoons and other assorted mammals. The smaller ones, I had learned in Fredericksburg, are called varmints. That covers most small mammals, with one exception: the Mexican free-tailed bat, which eats the worst varmints of all. In the Hill Country, the worst varmints are the smallest.

“A glorious creature,” two giggling ladies on the plane had told me. They were on their way to a convention, the Council of Bishops and Elders of the Evangelical Orthodox Baptist Persuasion, and they were very proud of Austin’s bats. In 1980, the city rebuilt the Congress Avenue Bridge over Town Lake, and the engineers left narrow slots in the concrete underneath. To a free-tailed bat, those slots were the finest real estate in Texas. Within a few years, a million and a half of them had moved in, the largest urban bat colony in North America. Austin panicked, and the newspapers ran stories about rabies, until a bat biologist named Merlin Tuttle moved to town and talked everyone down. Now people line the bridge on summer evenings to watch the bats pour out at dusk, a dark ribbon that unspools for the better part of an hour.

I had brought along some literature on the subject, and I had underlined the good parts. Free-tails eat mostly moths, many of them corn earworm moths, the same pest Texas cotton farmers call the bollworm. They hunt as high as ten thousand feet, riding the night winds to meet the moth migrations. One estimate puts the Texas colonies at six thousand to eighteen thousand metric tons of insects a year. The biggest colony isn’t in Austin at all, but in Bracken Cave, outside San Antonio, where some twenty million bats spend the summer in a single cave, the largest gathering of mammals on Earth. When they come out at night, they show up on the weather radar.

On the radio, a gospel quartet on the Lone Star Revival station was harmonizing about how God would make me successful if I tried my darndest for him, brighter in tone than a John Denver ditty. When I pulled into the ranger station at Enchanted Rock, the attendants nodded and waved me through.

Ordained on the Web

Enchanted Rock is a great pink dome of granite, more than a billion years old, rising some four hundred feet above the oaks. The Tonkawa believed spirits lived on it. On cool nights, the rock creaks and groans as it contracts, and you can see why they might have heard ghosts.

Before I made it to the trail, a gray-bearded man with yellow eyes walked up and began telling me about his travels in the Pacific Northwest. This, I had been warned, is called visitin’, the Texan propensity to chat.

“They won’t let you go. They just keep visiting with you and making it hard for you to leave,” the wise ladies of the Baptist persuasion had said, in a side note to our discussion of bats. I wanted to test this on the first Texan who visited with me, to see if I could outvisit him. I asked what he did. Web consulting, he said.

“But that’s not my real callin’, you see. In 1981, the Lord Jesus called me.”

“On the telephone?” I said, and couldn’t believe I had said it.

“No, the Lord came to me when my wife and I were livin’ out here in Hill Country. He spoke to me.”

“How did he do that?”

“It was a voice. He called on me to preach the gospel. Jesus Christ, the Lord, spoke to me. He told me that I need to give away everything I own and do God’s good work. So in the next couple weeks, I explained to my family that we would give away everything and sell the house.”

“So, are you a pastor?”

“Well, I’ve been evangelizing since 1981, but I was recently ordained on the web. When the Lord spoke to me again, he said that I was a good man, and that I obeyed him, and you know what he told me? He said that I am fit to evangelize in his name, the Lord our Father. And with this,” he said, pausing for effect, “I leave you to your thoughts.”

“So, is this your family?” I asked.

“Some of them. Those are my granddaughters, good girls, and the others are our Indian guides.”

I didn’t see any Indian guides, so I asked him a few more questions about Methodists and his family, until he said, “Well, I bet you’re in a hurry to get off now.” I had been outvisited.

Camels in Hill Country

I left the man to sort out his breakfast and followed the sandy washes that feed Sandy Creek a few miles out, to the far base of the rock. The granite is pink, so the sand is pink too. The woods at the base were dark at that hour, mossy and wet with ferns and the brown of a Central Texas winter. I crossed the domes on their polished bald faces, interrupted only by vernal pools, pockets of erosion in the rock filled with moss, algae, tiny ferns, a few small trees, and fairy shrimp that wait out the dry months as eggs in the dust.

It began to rain, then pour. I walked slowly on the slippery granite the three miles to the far end of the rocks, to a high point called Buzzard’s Roost, where I had the clearest view to the west: the land browning into the distance, until Texas becomes desert. From there I walked back to the car and drove to Kerrville, which I found to be a pleasant place.

I stopped in the local Quicky-Mart for a coffee and brought up the subject of the camels. “I guess I’ve never heard of the camels,” the woman at the counter said. But she was interested, which is maybe why I found Kerrville so pleasant, so I told her about her town’s great place in history.

In the 1850s, the U.S. Army suddenly had a vast new West to supply, most of it desert, and the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, a future president of the Confederacy, had an idea. In 1856, the Navy storeship Supply landed thirty-three camels, bought around the Mediterranean, at Indianola on the Texas coast. A second shipload arrived the next year. The camels walked inland to Camp Verde, just south of Kerrville, which became the home of the U.S. Camel Corps. With them came a handful of drivers from the Ottoman world, among them a Syrian named Hadji Ali, whom the soldiers called Hi Jolly.

In 1857, a former navy lieutenant named Edward Beale took twenty-five of the camels west to California, surveying a wagon road along the thirty-fifth parallel. The horses and mules suffered in the desert. The camels carried several hundred pounds apiece, ate the creosote and greasewood the mules wouldn’t touch, and went days without water, as if they had never needed it. Beale came home a convert. The next Secretary of War, John Floyd, asked Congress for a thousand more.

Congress never bought them. The Civil War came, Confederate troops took Camp Verde in 1861, and the camels drifted out of the Army’s hands. The dromedary foot was built for the soft sands of the Empty Quarter, and the rocky West bruised it. Horses bolted at the smell of them. Muleskinners hated them. Even the Confederacy ended up with a camel, a dromedary named Douglas who carried the band instruments of the 43rd Mississippi Infantry until a Union sharpshooter killed him at the siege of Vicksburg. After the war, the Army auctioned off the rest, and some were simply turned loose.

For decades afterward, prospectors and ranchers in Arizona swore they saw wild camels in the desert. The most famous was the Red Ghost, a huge reddish camel that haunted the Arizona Territory in the 1880s. The first reports said it trampled a woman to death, and that it carried a dead man lashed to its back. When a rancher finally shot it in 1893, rawhide straps were still cut deep into its hide. Hi Jolly stayed in Arizona, prospected, and died in Quartzsite in 1902. His grave is a stone pyramid with a copper camel on top.

“Camels,” said the woman at the Quicky-Mart. “In Kerrville.” She shook her head and topped off my coffee.

I drove to San Antonio, San Antone to the folks in Austin, and San Tone to the folks in San Antonio. I wasn’t sure what to do there, so I pulled in to the local Quicky-Mart to fill up on gas. This one was much larger than the ones in Fredericksburg and Kerrville. Its stock was indistinguishable from anywhere in the United States. I was in California, I was in Ohio, I was in Boston. I was in San Antonio, and I wouldn’t even have known it. The great accomplishment of modern travel is the loss of place. I’d rather walk through a swamp.

So I took the road toward Houston: flatlands of farms, narrow stands of trees hugging the rivers, imperial-sized Quicky-Marts, antique shops, adult video stores. I pulled off and walked along a flooded river that had filled the surrounding woods with stale water, flies and the stink of bog. A mile or so downstream, where the river widened, the floodplain gave way to mud thick with dwarf palmetto, a tropical-looking plant that seems out of place this far inland, and a reminder among the farmlands that the Gulf of Mexico is not so far away.

Teamsters and a Chupacabra

The next day, I met a pair of Teamsters lounging at a cafeteria. I asked them what they thought of Austin.

“Good place to get drunk.”

And San Antonio?

“San Antone? Too many Macabas.”

“What’s that?”

“You know, wetbacks.”

“So what’s up with the Nazi symbol?” I asked, nodding at a tattoo on one of their arms.

“It’s throwing away discrimination,” he said, and showed me that the swastika was being tossed through a basketball hoop. I asked him about the other tattoo, a gruesome skull-like creature with large ears, like its host.

“That’s chupacabra,” he said. The goat-sucker is a varmint-sized demon that drains the blood of livestock. It was first reported in Puerto Rico in 1995 and had since moved, like so many people, to Mexico and Texas. “This represents my heritage.”

Later, in a taxi to a barbecue place in Austin, we passed a neighborhood of large homes. “I prefer space,” said the driver.

“Why?”

“Lot of good hunting and fishing out there.”

“What do people hunt for?”

“Oh, lots of pheasant in this area.”

“You get any yet this year?”

“It ain’t season yet, but I just shoot targets anyway. Cans, bottles, ground squirrels, chipmunks, you know.”

“Varmints?”

“Yeah, varmints.”

On my last night in Austin, having learned to appreciate the Texan propensity to chat, I sat over brisket, ribs, queso, chicken-fried steak and pork with strangers. Some were from New York City, some from Seattle, and more still from San Jose and Plano. They all seemed a little bewildered by all this food, all this animal. Texans love animals. Where else would you employ a corps of camels, hunt varmints, and treasure bats?

The Bat Corps

Had the U.S. military ever employed a Bat Corps? In the library, I found that it nearly had. A few weeks after Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle Adams, who had just watched the bats pour out of Carlsbad Caverns, wrote to the White House with a plan: strap tiny firebombs to free-tailed bats and drop them over Japan. Roosevelt passed the letter along with a note: “This man is not a nut.”

So the military went ahead. Louis Fieser, the Harvard chemist who had just invented napalm, designed incendiaries small enough for a bat to carry, a fraction of an ounce each. The plan was to chill thousands of bats into hibernation, pack them into bomb casings, and drop them over Japanese cities at dawn. At a thousand feet the casings would open, the bats would wake and scatter into the eaves and attics of wooden houses, and then the timers would go off. The Navy leased four bat caves here in the Hill Country and posted guards at the entrances.

It worked a little too well. In May 1943, at an Army airfield in Carlsbad, New Mexico, some armed bats got loose, roosted under the buildings and burned down part of the base, including a general’s car. Later that year, at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the bat bombs burned a mock Japanese village convincingly to the ground.

In 1944, after some two million dollars and thousands of bats, the Navy shelved the project. Something faster was coming along in New Mexico.

On the way to the airport, I thought about the Congress Avenue Bridge and the million and a half bats waking up under it, cousins, maybe, of the ones the Navy had wanted to send to Japan. In Texas, even the varmint-eaters get drafted.