Visiting Temple

We decided to drive down to Temple to visit Aunt Leah (Arnie's sister) and Gary, so after another of Mike's excessive breakfasts, we climbed into Joy's SUV and made the 2-hour drive down 35W.

From the freeway, all of Texas resembles a giant strip mall. No-one walks in Texas, the roads aren't built for it and neither, for that matter, are the people. Coming from a coastal California city this is crazy. On the way towards the twisted spaghetti bowls of freeway interchanges outside of Fort Worth, we passed a coffee shop called 'Loves Coffee' that was a 40 minutes drive from anything. I couldn't imagine how it survived. Were all its customers people commuting between cities?

We heard dozens of stories about people with crazy daily commutes. So and so was driving 2 hours and 15 minutes to work one-way every day, but they'd just purchased a house that would shorten this commute to 1 hour each way. Curtis, Joann's son, was commuting 1.5 hours every day. Though he was sleeping under the same roof, we didn't see him very often.

Besides the insane work commute, another common topic of conversation was how crowded the roads were and how bad the traffic was.

I wondered if the driving was necessary because of the crazy weather. At the beginning of April it was almost pleasant; barring the occasional tornado and sudden cold snap, but in the summer we were told it regularly reached 110F (43C) and in the winter, climate change was bringing killer ice storms. Maybe owning a mobile shelter was necessary in such a hostile place. Still it didn't seem sustainable, and if the gas ever runs out, the whole state would be a write-off. With fossil fuel driven climate change it's only going to get worse.

We arrived in Temple a half hour early and stopped at a Mexican restaurant called Marias for lunch. The place was almost empty, but it had a nice layout and the staff stood around as if waiting for a rush. Around the corner of the building, down a set of stairs that seemed to lead to a basement, there was a sign for a used bookstore. I sent Amanda down to scout.

The basement contained one of those bookstores I didn't think existed anymore. It was a labyrinth of bookshelves and columns of stacked paperbacks piled to the ceiling. We met the store cat, walked past the CBD oil display, pop culture collectibles, and the random assortment of warhammer figurines to a doorway leading to what seemed like a stockroom containing more books. Then, from there I went through another doorway into a concrete walled basement with a litter box, cleaning supplies, old costumes, fire extinguishers, and food containers, and about 50 boxes of comic books packed onto shelves and set on a table in the center of the room.

It was like a collector had died and given them his collection. All the comics were mixed together, and I only managed to get through two boxes before it was time to leave. I picked up a Thing comic from 1985 because the artwork gave me joy. The comic was in a bag and didn't have a price, so I took it up to the front and the woman went onto google to see how much it was worth. I was worried it was going to come up as $30, but she asked for $3.19 after tax. I only had $3 in cash in my wallet, but she spotted me the 19 cents.

I'd forgotten how much Leah and Gary liked their dogs. Amanda and joy pointed out the dog statue out front and the conversation for that morning, the rest of the day, and well into the night, was about dogs. Amanda tried to use her unnatural powers of bird enthusiasm to deflect the conversation, but she was struggling. We were shown their dog shrine (Leah called them ex-family members) and we got to hear all about what had happened to their "children" since the last and only time we saw them, twelve years before. There were stories of cancer, spinal injuries, twisted stomachs, escapes, broken furniture, and fights with suicidal chihuahuas.

Leah is like Arnie, with similar mannerisms and wry outlook on life, but she speaks without pause or respite. Gary is older, with firm conservative views. The conversation veered perilously close to the Chinese family that lived next door and the crazy foreign things they were up to (ninjas were mentioned) and we heard about how all the neighbors helped each other out when the ice-storms knocked out power to the city. When we told him we considered going down to Mexico to see the eclipse, Gary told us we probably would have been chopped up and our pieces sent back for ransom.

After hours of talking about dogs we moved out to the backyard to continue talking about dogs and to discuss all the building going on in their neighborhood, but the wind was high and after a half hour, we had to return to the safety of the house. Amanda went running after a plastic bag that had blow in from the nearby construction site.

Eventually Amanda convinced Gary to drive us out to the local lake to look for birds. Gary drove, and I sat in the front passenger seat with his cane in my foot well. During the drive he often claimed not to know where he was or where we were going and Leah told him where to turn at each intersection.

We ran a red light. The light changed, well ahead of us, and Gary braked a bit, and then decided to continue on through, but we were still going pretty slow, and far from the line. Everyone in the backseat started to holler as we rolled through the intersection, I grabbed the door handle, and all other cars lined up at the intersection watched as we went by.

"That was the first red light I've ever run in my entire life!"

Eventually we made it to the reservoir, and Gary slowly drove past the empty ticket booth and through the parking lot. He seemed to have no intention of stopping the car, and Amanda was at a tactical disadvantage being seated in the middle seat of the back row, clutching her camera and binoculars.

Eventually we convinced him to actually stop and Leah got out and let Amanda bird for a few minutes in the driving wind. There wasn't much to see, starlings, a distant tern, and a seagull that quickly blew away in the gale.

Gary left the car running while we walked down to the water's edge and Joy stayed with him. They were probably talking about crazy birders.

We drove a little farther down the road and sat in the idling car for a while. It was too windy to get out and there were no birds in sight. The lingering smell of dogs was giving me a headache.

From the reservoir, we visited the Belton dam and Leah let Amanda get out again to look at the circling vultures and osprey. From the locked gate near the dam, we could look down into the water a hundred feet below and see large fish circling and surfacing in the rocky shallows.

On the way back to the van, Amanda spotted a scissor tail flycatcher on the power line, and she let out a shout and sprinted off after it. We'd seen three along the highway on the drive down, and she was desperate to get a good picture.

From the top of the dam we drove around the corner to walk around the outflow at the base. As we went down the road Amanda mentioned how she was surprised we hadn't seen a roadrunner because the habitat was perfect. A moment later I spotted a roadrunner beside the road, and we all hollered until Gary stopped the car and let us get out.

At the base of the dam, Gary and Joy sat in the idling car while Amanda, Leah, and I walked along the river. We saw yellow crowned night herons in the trees across the water.

From the dam we drove back into town to see the old jail which had been converted into an airbnb, and at the big metal cage on wheels they used to transport prisoners.

Then we drove down to park by the river where it ran through the downtown restaurants, kids were throwing rocks at the muscovy ducks, and grackles bathed in the shallows. The gravel under the bridge looked strange, and when I bent to pick one up, I discovered it was a fossilized shell. All the gravel was a jumble of fossilized shells and I spent my time with eyes downcast, looking for good specimens. I came back with a pocket full of rocks with the curly end pieces of forty million-year-old scallops.

Though I was still uncomfortably full from lunch, Leah insisted we visit a steakhouse. Their preferred place had closed at 3pm, so we went around the block a few times, navigating the treacherous stop lights (Gary couldn't see the color of the lights through his sun visor) while they complained about the traffic, and how all the ice cream shops had gone out of business. Eventually we found the second-best steakhouse in Belton. The Schoepfs Steakhouse was expensive, and I was too full to justify getting anything. Amanda ordered a chopped brisket sandwich and a sopaipilla cheesecake with a side of potatoes and beans. The restaurant had a definite vibe, with low ceilings, steel sheeting on the walls, and a paper towel dispenser on the table.

On the drive back to the house Gary told us how about how Sam Houston's slave continued to live in Temple after he was freed because he loved his master so much.

Then it was back to the house to talk about dogs some more. Their golden retriever was funny. Leah turned on a flashlight and put it on the carpet in the center of the living room and the dog would poke it to make it spin and then bark at the light that was projected on the wall. This continued for an hour after which he played a game where he opened the back door with a head through the doggy flap, barked at the corner of the swinging door, and then closed it again with his nose. He played until he passed out at 9pm.

Despite his health issues, Gary volunteers at the local hospital. Exposure to agent-orange in Vietnam destroyed his ability to make melanin. He was using a nebulizer in the evening to treat his cardiopulmonary disease.

I spent the evening reading comics on my tablet and I didn't sleep well due to a headache caused by dog dander or the wind.