June 24, 2021
I’m a bit of a mess right now. Ironic since I’m staying in the beautiful uptown New Orleans home of my college girlfriend Julie and her fiancée Dave and not in the truck. Denton overwhelmed me a bit. If I don’t get to that issue in this journal entry I will. I’ve already done plenty of writing about it. I just need to hone it into something that a person might actually like to read.
But beyond the flood of thoughts and ideas around my Denton visit, there are things that have needed more immediate attention here in New Orleans. Julie and Dave went out to do exercise at their gyms this morning and I began to use that time for packing up and for calling Apple support to fix some email issues I’ve been having. In between downloading a new security recommendation I went out to my truck to start arranging things for leaving today and found there have been water incursions in the last few days of downpours. Remember what I said about bad things being good for jogging memories? Now the thought came into my head very clearly from when I was working on my truck—make sure to caulk those windows on the camper shell after you put them back in.
Now I’ve got my mattress out of the truck standing up in Julie and Dave’s back yard with notebooks lined up on a ladder that hangs on their back fence. It’s the only place I could find the sun hitting. There are lots of beautiful live oaks and other trees in this neighborhood, but with all the shade and 99.999% humidity, it’s hard to dry things out. I’m sure they will come back any moment and wonder why Jed Clampett and his hillbilly family has taken over their yard and left the doors and tailgate open on a truck in front of their house. Thank goodness I know Julie well. I’m pretty sure my predicament will illicit a good laugh.
Rain has been a theme this week. I left Denton in a downpour on Monday. Downpours mean traffic accidents and I was in a jam on I-35 going west about to go do a little more sleuthing to find the Shady Oaks Ranch. I was sitting there not moving much for 15 minutes. When I finally inched my way close enough to an exit, I went down the ramp, under the freeway and got back on the interstate going the other way. That’s one of the nice things about urban boondocking. Traffic jam? Exit town and don’t look back.
Actually, I probably will look back. My understanding of Denton is just not done yet. I really would like to find out what happened to the Shady Oaks Ranch on my way back to California in August. I know this much from trying to find the ranch Monday morning: that Northeast area has been chopped up. It’s still rural, but the rural is corralled and in the process of becoming contained. There is literally an interstate circle around the city now. No big news here. You’ve all heard of bypasses and getting on “the loop” to avoid downtowns. Well, now fingers are making their way off the loop. When enough fingers make their way off the loop then the city might make a second loop. On google maps cities start to look like bomb blasts or craters with the concentric rings of freeways and more concrete than plant life.
This is a good time to clarify something. In the course of talking with a librarian at the North Denton Library branch she clued me in that the greater Denton metropolis of Denton County has a population of approximately 950,000 people. The 150,000 I quoted earlier is only for the city proper. This explains the insane growth which I haven’t really given you a good visual for yet. Unfortunately I’m starting to feel a bit like the cloth that gets pulled together when a loose string is pulled. All the places I’m visiting are stacking up and although I’ve made time to write about them I haven’t had enough time to stretch them out, pat them down and make them presentable like a well-set table. That is the challenge in the coming weeks while still visiting Hattiesburg, Tallahassee, Winchester and Sewanee.
“Take it bird by bird buddy, bird by bird.” I hear Anne Lamott’s long dead father talk to me and I’m letting him help me out here. I need a long sigh of relief…and maybe a beer.
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Before I left Denton I had a happy discovery. Londonderry Lane Apartments is not the only place that remains. The KOA I lived in after Shady Oaks is still there, albeit called by another name: Destiny Dallas RV Resort.
The office staff at the RV Resort let me drive through to see my old haunt. It’s now only for long-term camping and the host did not want me walking through because she thought it might make some residents nervous.
Most places aren’t improved by age, but the old KOA looked better than ever. They do a good job with upkeep but the main reason is nature—the trees are twice as big and twice as many as when I was living there 44 years ago.
I became a very good pool player in the gameroom at the KOA. I looked through the window glad to see they still have a table. A groundskeeper—a Vietnam vet who would have acid flash backs while he was on the riding mower—gave me a few handfuls of quarters painted with red nail polish every few weeks.
“Use these quarters on the pool table—not for candy or anything else,” he said.
If you remember how pool works you know the looser pays. As I got better and better I was sticking fewer and fewer of those red quarters in the pool table and the groundskeeper, or whoever was making money off the table, was making more and more off me—their little eleven year old hustler.
Another memorable moment at the KOA was when a famous lion tamer came through with all his big cats in a paneled big rig trailer. The lion tamer camped across from our spot on the back row of the campgrounds. (These spots were reserved for long-term residents.) He was a bleached-blond man in his late fifties who walked around with his shirt off showing the hundreds of white scars of varying length and angle that stood out from his tan body.
I smelled the big beasts before I saw them. They were in their trailer at the front of the grounds. The panels had been lifted and propped open with long boards. I felt sorry for the big cats. There was a double-deck of eight barred cages each containing a single lion or tiger. It was a hot day and most were flopped over panting.
As a final note I’ve decided to stop eating beef…or at least to cut way back. Seeing a truck load of cattle on their way to the slaughter house did it. Of course, I’ve seen that many times on the road, but something about their soulful eyes this time…
Spotty West Goes East 