This has been most unusual spring in South Texas… it has not gotten really hot, except for a day or so at a time, before reverting to mild days and cool nights more typical of early spring. And it has rained… a lot. Holy Rubber Waders, Batman, it has rained so much that the wildflowers have lingered and lingered, well past the time when they have usually withered and died back into the grass, which is usually looking pretty crispy by this time as well. But no, as of this week there are still acres of scarlet and dark gold Mexican hat, purple thistles along the roadside, and masses of little yellow daisies. And everything is still green… so lush it looks variously like England (according to William) or North Carolina (according to Blondie.)

William was originally going to go down to Corpus Christi to visit an old friend, but he lost the address, and we couldn’t locate a current telephone number… so I thought it would be at least interesting to go down to the coast anyway. I rather wanted to see the site of Indianola, and the citadel at Goliad. Blondie was on spring break, and I had the day free, so what the hell. And the Lesser Weevil had never seen the ocean… or any body of water much bigger than one of the seasonal creeks at McAllister Park.

It was a beautiful morning, we had a cooler full of water, bottled tea and energy drinks, Weevil had peed her bladder dry, and so we set out early in Blondie’s Montero sport. My idea, the early start, and Weevil at least was enthusiastic. Blondie and William, being late night-owls and late sleepers were somewhat less enthused. My idea, also to take the secondary roads… well, there was no more direct way to get there, anyway. So, two-lane road, sometimes with a median, slow-down to go through towns that sometimes aren’t more than a hiccup of three houses and a post-office… but no traffic light. A stop sign, maybe. A mixture of houses, set back from the road out in the country closer to it in the hamlets, everything from an ornate wedding-cake of a mansion on a hill near Karnes City (it was a multi-million dollar house, on the market for years) all the way down the scale to houses that appeared suspiciously to be double-wide trailers battened onto a concrete slab and tarted up a little, and everything in between, from little craftsman-style bungalows to modern McMansions in two tones of brick

But in between was the countryside, green and rolling and beautiful. The hills go on for quite a way south of San Antonio, gentler but still recognizably rolling, but all of a sudden just south of Goliad and Victoria… the land abruptly becomes as flat as a pancake, and there are no more oak trees, and nothing to block the sight of the horizon in any direction. The clouds skated over in long lines; it all looked as big as Texas is always advertised to be. The road was elevated and many houses were on stilts, for an excellent reason; apparently there’s nothing to stop a storm surge coming in from the Gulf for a good few miles.

There was nothing left of Indianola but a monument and some markers, a scattering of holiday homes and pavilions by the water-edge. We induced Weevil to venture into the water, and watched a loaded barge move up towards Port Lavaca, and that was about it as far as amusements by the seaside went.

We couldn’t even find a place to eat, in Port Lavaca where we could sit outside with the dog, so we settled for a Whataburger in Cuero… That would have made somewhat more of a point to the trip, having something by the coast, but we just kind of planned on stopping wherever our fancy and chance took us. For some cruel reason, thought, there was nothing of the sort on any of the coast roads we took: no quaint smoky BBQ places where you eat off paper plates and clean up with a roll of paper towels, no funky sea-food restaurants complete with mooching seagulls. Blondie will be extremely annoyed if we find out we missed such a place by half a block or something stupid like that.

Now, Quero is a decent little town, with many beautifully kept old houses…it looks at least alive, which is more than can be said for Nixon or Smiley. Nixon looked like a sad, half-shuttered place, and if you sneezed as you drove into Smiley, you missed it entirely.
Karnes City and Goliad were lively enough, and the citadel was most interesting… of all the places where the Texas War for Independence were fought, it’s the one that still appears most like it did in 1836. Frankly, most people are a little disheartened about the Alamo; all that is left of it is the chapel and part of the barracks, but the Citadel la Bahia has a complete circuit of walls and buildings; much easier to visualize how it would have looked when Fannin’s men were marched away.

To me it was worthwhile, though; a chance to see that part of Texas looking more impossibly beautiful than I had ever thought it could be. Now I know why the early settlers were so taken with it, but I warn anyone who will come and hope to see the same, next year at this time: this year was an anomaly… it will not look this good again for about another fifteen years.