I took a break from all things Tea Party this last weekend, and hit the highway – this in support of the book thing. You remembered the book and author thingy, that I work on, in between blogging for this and that, managing this and that, editing or reviewing this and that, designing this and that? Anyway, months ago I had been invited to participate in a one-day multi-cultural festival at the Fort Bend Museum in Richmond on Saturday. It used to be more of a strictly Hispanic festival, but the director wanted to incorporate something of the German and Czech element, and I thought it might be fun, and they said I could sell copies of the Trilogy … so there I went. It was the first long road-trip in the GG, the new-to-me Acura Legend that replaced the VEV last month, three hours on IH-10 East, almost-but-not-quite to Houston.

Blondie was supposed to go with me; we were to stay Friday night at the director’s house, do the festival and stay Saturday night, and come back early Sunday morning. I guess we could have gone up early Saturday morning, as the festival didn’t start until noon, and come back that night – but it did seem like an awful lot of driving in one day. But our next-door neighbor’s grandson wasn’t available to look after the animals, and Blondie had a big test on Wednesday – so, there I went, off on my own. Driving back on Saturday night was simply out of the question, after a long afternoon at the festival.

What a joy to drive a car where everything worked, reliably – especially the air conditioning, even if I lost the classical music station a few miles east of the turn-off for Gonzalez. And even more of a joy – getting to Katy and only having run through half a tank of gas.
That part of East Texas is subtly different from the area around San Antonio, and the Hill Country that I know – it’s more heavily wooded, with stands of massive, spreading oak trees interspersed with meadows of tall-grass – and much, much greener, especially after a summer where we haven’t had all that much rain. I zipped over rivers – the Guadalupe, the Colorado, and finally the Brazos – all running deep and placid. Around Richmond, suburban lawns are lush and green – not half-dead and crispy brown as they are around San Antonio. In East Texas, tall oaks loom over the houses, and the smaller trees form tangled thickets, stitched together with wild grapevines. There are creeks with water running in them, lakes and waterways – it reminds me of England, a bit. This was the bit of Texas that was historically more Anglo; there was never much Hispanic presence here. It was the closest to the then-United States in the 19th century, and presumably offered those American settlers in Texas a little more of what they were accustomed to, as far as landscape and plant-life went; a little more Southern rather than Southwest, flatter rather than gently rolling.

Richmond is pretty much now a bedroom suburb of Houston. Enough remains of the town to show what it once was like, when it was a discrete entity to itself , anchored by the railway and a bend of the Brazos, adorned with stately, white-pillared homes, rambling Victorian cottages trimmed with yards of wooden gingerbread trim, and dignified old two-storey commercial blocks on the main street. Here and there, during the last half-century, someone with lots of money and no sense of fitness shoe-horned in a structure of concrete-shoe-box style modern – every example of such being as jarringly out of place as a juicy fart in church. Which is a good thing, I guess, that Richmond was prosperous enough over the years that institutions and businesses could to rebuild – but still, it must make it a challenge to pull off a historical district, when the district is broken up with indigestible chunks of Brutal Concrete Moderne.

Anyway – I had a lovely time, talked to a fair number of people, sold three sets of the Trilogy – including two sets to members of the local German heritage society, both of whom knew very little about the Hill Country settlements and the Adelsverein scheme generally. There were a lot of early Texas connections in Richmond – meaning, from the 1820s and 1830s. Jane Long – the widow of one early pioneer/adventurer lived there for many years, as did Carry Nation, she of the saloon-smashing temperance brigade. So did Mirabeau Lamar, sometime president of the Republic of Texas, who fought with Sam Houston like two tomcats in a sack. Sam Houston’s master of scouts, Erastus “Deaf” Smith is also buried there – ostensibly on the current museum’s grounds, but possibly underneath the nearby street intersection. And Benjamin Franklin Terry, of Terry’s Texas Rangers Civil War fame, came from nearby and recruited locally – his saddle, out of which he was shot in fighting around Woodsonville, Kentucky, is in the museum. And after the end of the Civil War, the Woodpeckers and the Jaybirds – gangs formed by partisans of Reconstruction, and of Southern sympathizers fought at least one pitched battle for control of Fort Bend County.
Some of this – people, places and events will eventually become part of my new trilogy, but you will probably have to wait a couple of years to find out exactly how much.