Barzzzzz, muzzzzic, muzt be Auztin

Sixth Street, Austin, Texas is hoppin' on the slowest night of the year. As we pass the bars, we can tell from outside that the music is great… We cross the wrong street, and find ourselves in a tenderloin of flop houses, tattoo parlors and shivering hungry ghosts…. We cross back and they disappear…..

Suddenly, we are in front of Katz's Deli and its companion bar, the Meow, a 24/7 food and watering place unlike anything at home. We share corned beef, cole slaw and Russian dressing (no, not the ensemble of a model from Moscow) and real, real rye bread. The pickles are perfect and we order more cole slaw.

Wandering, we find Book People, a huge independent book store, open until 11:00 pm and are so transfixed, we never make it to the second floor. But everything is closing for Thanksgiving, the temperature dropped 40 degrees today from a high of 81, and roads are icing over. We scan our maps, check accuweather and plot a route through El Paso. Austin will have to wait. We plan to pack up the boychicks and head home.

Lush and lovely

San Antonio: loving it, especially the foggy morning and the humidity... It feels like a rain forest, with dense vegetation and water everywhere. We didn't know how parched we had become, living in the desert, until we came to this warm and gentle place. The Riverwalk stretches beyond the downtown tourist area, twisting and turning, taking a subterranean path… When we come up a new set of stairs or cross a new bridge, there are fountains and pools…It's a walking city, our favorite kind.

Our hotel, the Emily Morgan, was named after the slave mistress of Mexican General Santa Anna: evidently she betrayed him to the Americans, perhaps a comment on his style. We have a wonderful room, a view of the Alamo, and a room service menu for dogs. Marcel, by the way, is a hit in San Antonio… he already has a following and he is adoring the attention. Magnifco, meanwhile, is suffering from the humidity and being upstaged, and needs a bit of reassurance…

The blog has become our companion, and through you and your comments, we have great company. It is ecological (no paper, no mail, no energy….), ephemeral (yesterday is so over) spontaneous (write anything and let the chips fall where they may). You no longer have to register to comment, so be our guest!

On the road in cyberspace

Blogging and traveling are alike in that they are spontaneous, open ended, absorbing and unpredictable. You start out with an idea of a destination, but as Emerson pointed out, nothing's perfect but the thought of it. On the road that first day, it was exhilarating to go 90 on an empty two lane highway through the flat, featureless center of New Mexico, crushing to see the Halliburton office in Artesia. (Just what are they doing there?) It was strange to see the grasshopper-shaped oil wells, bowing continuously to the goddess of energy.

It was lovely to arrive in Marfa to that wide wonderful main street (wide enough to drive a herd of cattle through) and our lovely room at El Paisano, bizarre to find a copy of Garden and Gun on my bedside table. But everyone, without exception, has been delightful. No one in our experience has had an edge, let alone a gun.

In Marfa, Eugene Binder opened his gallery, with two vintage Porsches out front, so we could see Donald Rubenstein and Kiki Smith's evocative collaborative drawings. In Ft. Davis, where we stopped for carrot pumpkin muffins, everyone in the café joined in the conversation. On the road we saw (gratefully) a bumper sticker that said, Texas Democrat.

On our blog, we are learning to upload, edit and correct. (By the way, Marcel has a 22, not a 38, in his hip and Duchamp has a small c: like a good newspaper, we correct our mistakes.) To our readers who have tried to comment, including Matty, Mariam, Alina, Morty, Carol, Elissa and others, Thank You! We will troubleshoot that feature. I understand it can be fixed so that visitors need not register…We'll let you know. Thanks for tuning in to Seeking Texas.

Loving Marfa

Marfa is an unlikely combination of art town and border patrol, rural America with a Spanish colonial background, tiny, poor population with an influx of sophisticated free spending visitors. It's friendly, slow moving and open. It's also reminiscent of small town America in the 40's: wide main street, loud freight trains crossing the main drag, a single blinking red light, and old, lovely stores, now in another incarnation as galleries. Everyone seems ready to become a friend… one gallery owner said there is not such things as a quick errand, because there is talk, talk, talk…

Donald Judd, the artist who started this phenomenon, worked here during the war, when there was a German prison of war camp here. Tonight we are going to a fundraiser to save the prisoners' murals, so we'll get a sense of the space, 60 years later. There is a wonderful local book store across the street, with a strange and wonderful collection. Browsing the fiction today, I was aware of how the books you've read, companions of your past, speak to you quietly as your eyes scan the titles on the shelves…. We're going back there for a reading by an African poet….We're amazingly busy for our first 24 hours in a town of 2100.

Our hotel, El Paisano, is lovely, with a little courtyard for Marcel and Magnifico, and a view of the dome of the Presidio County Courthouse, which at night becomes our nightlight.

Our traveling companions: The Boychicks

Marcel DuChamp and Magnifico are eager to be on their way to Texas. For Marcel, the return to his home state will be bittersweet. He still has the 38 bullet embedded in his hip from the time he bolted across the wrong stretch of pasture. And he hasn’t forgotten how he flunked out of assistance dog training. He has studied biology and he agrees with Kinky Friedman: How can you look at the Texas legislature and still believe in intelligent design?

Still, both boychicks have an invincible sense of adventure. Their ambition is to lie on rugs in motel rooms in all 48 contiguous states. And they don’t like to be left behind. Magnifico would follow us anywhere, straight into the jaws of hell itself. Marcel likes to go where there are women’s voices. On the street, he straightens up when he hears a woman and must meet her. They both seek the tantalizing scent left by other dogs and they literally trip all over each other to get to it first. Marcel always wins and then he paws the ground and kicks dirt behind him like a bull waiting to tear through his first red cape.

Seeking Kinky Freedman and Donald Judd

Texas. I once had visions of dusty pickups dragging people in their wake, drivers tossing beercans out the window in a drug and alcohol induced wave of destruction. We're hoping to avoid that Texas. We're also hoping to avoid the Texas of public defenders who sleep through capital offense trials, resulting in rampant death penalties and the Texas of spewing oil wells and their liposuctioned, pinky ringed owners. In other words, the Texas of white gentile country clubs and well oiled insider deals.

Hopefully there is another Texas, where people like Kinky Freedman and Donald Judd live out their unlikely lives and attract a following. Friday we load Magnifico and Marcel DuChamp into the Rav 4 and take Route 10 through Roswell and Carlsbad. If you are not from New Mexico, you cannot imagine the emptiness of the open road here, where you can go for 45 minutes and not see a car and intersections marked "Congested Area" clock perhaps 8 vehicles a day. We'll keep you posted and if you have memories of Texas, weigh in!