Kerrville's Museum Of Western Art

An association of cowboy artists was pondering where to build a home to store and display their art when a man from Kerrville, Texas spoke up and said he had land to spare and would they like some? Which explains why this highly rated museum is located off the beaten path near Fredericksburg, Texas, if it's near anything at all.

It's a building filled with art and artifacts. Take the Conestoga wagon, named for the manufacturer in the Conestoga Valley of Pennsylvania (who knew?). The pioneers called them prairie schooners owing to their white canopies billowing like sails on the horizon. As they moved at a slow walking pace to the Pacific Coast...I know there is no resemblance but I saw our Promaster when I looked at these rugged homes away from homes for those hardy travelers.

The building was created using locally sourced mesquite wood to tile the floors and the ceiling is dotted with 28 specially arched skylights built by a Mexican specialist brought to Texas to do the work. He only got a thirty day visa so work that was planned to take 60 days was done in half the time.

Pretty impressive work:

Clearly a lot of thought has gone into the design and layout of the place and they are proud of it. 

It's called the Museum of Western Art but that in the end boils down to cowboys and related scenery and paraphernalia. I included this painting, by native Texan G Harvey, in an effort to illustrate the allure of the hill country in its prime: wild flower season, the best time to visit I am told.

Of artifacts I was struck by the bank donation of a shoeshine bench. It screams period dress and habits, like the swinging doors of a saloon bar on the wild frontier...

There were so many paintings, statues and items on display it was incumbent on me to try to find the ones that spoke to me. This one, below, by Fred Harman of Red Ryder comic book fame, took me back to the Conestoga wagon theme. The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci interviewed Henry Kissinger in 1972 and in that interview he confessed to his immigrant's idea of the cowboy as a metaphor for the American experience:

She asks him how he explains his popularity. At first he declines to answer. Then he gives in to her line of questioning: “The main point arises from the fact that I’ve always acted alone,” he says. “Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town, the village, with his horse and nothing else.”

After being published in L’Europeo, the article is reprinted in several American newspapers and read all over the United States, where it becomes a scandal. Nixon is not at all pleased by the cowboy metaphor. Kissinger tries to deny that he has said these things, but he is contradicted by Oriana, who has a recording. 

For me the wagon gives me the stability and the independence that a motorcycle never did. I love stopping by the side of the road and having lunch "at home." But the lone cowboy is the romantic image. In the two pictures below, by Joe Beeler, I was fascinated by the study on the left and the final image, so much stronger with the powerful background, my favorite leading lines:

I'm not sure this painting translates well into a photograph because what grabbed me was the three dimensional quality of the red dirt. In person it was startling. Close up I saw tiny dabs of paint, red orange brown and yellow that together brought the dirt the cows were running over right into my face. Very impressive.

This cowboy was a modern representation, no guns, sunglasses (!) and quite fashionable at that... I loved the style of the rider, the pose, the long hair, the giant hat, the perfect control of the lasso, the ease of the posture. 

This painting below is the work of Harvey Young who studied in Munich and Paris came back to the West with what looked to me like a very European style. The light on the mountains reminds me of works set in the much less wild regions painted by British artists of the 19th century. Young had money apparently because ehe had a private rail car which he attached to trains as they went his way and which he used as his own home and studio on wheels. Not bad.

A section of the museum devoted to the education of the young tried to present a realistic view of the tough challenges of pioneer life. Fair enough.

The exhibits side step the more awkward questions raised by the migration westward. Indians and buffalos are notable by their forced submission to the new country expanding west but they really don't get a mention here.

In my mind the people who took to the trail and went west bus have been desperate in their lives back home wherever that was. This was no easy journey to a place known to them by reputation. And as far as this exhibition space goes that's enough. 

What I like most about the museum is the recognition it brings to a group of artists not well known or often shown. Frederic Remington is who we the general public know about, vaguely, but the others? It's really nice to see this art in this place celebrating a time and a place and a romanticism that lives in us to some degree today. Rolling across Texas in my covered wagon I spend time behind the wheel thinking about covered wagons taking all day to cover ground that took me half an hour. 

Hunting for the answer to my own question about the respectability of "cowboy art" in the art world I came across a great article published in 1987 in The Oklahoman and still to be found online, about an exhibit of western art in Paris of all places. 

A section from that article:

“But even in a country that invented the expression avante garde, it seems that everything old can be new again.

Jean-Claud Farjas, an artist with a painting hanging in the exposition, said: "I love it because it's painting that will come back to fashion. It's an honest kind of art."

Anore Jacque Min, a member of France's Legion of Honor, which admits only the most respected artists, went into more detail on the subject.

"I think that in the American painting of the West, the structure or construction of the landscape and personages are very special and characteristic of much of European paintings.”

I could have spent half the morning looking at the row of western saddles on display. Personalized, obviously loved in a way that goes far beyond the utility of a tool needed to ride a horse. The pommel reminds me of a cleat on a sailboat, used like the pommel to secure a line.

And then there were a couple of high class models, a stage coach and a chuck wagon. Amazing.

Nick Eggenhofer. was born in Bavaria. in 1897 and worked out of a studio in Wyoming. There is apparently a huge desire for cowboy stories in Germany, and in Italy when I was a child we loved a comic book series, still published about the adventures of a Texas Ranger called Tex Willer. 

I look at the chuck wagon model and think of the modern small camper trailers with kitchens built into the back offering an open air kitchen for campers who manage to sleep inside the tiny confines of the small tear drop trailers.

Looking at the stage coach I saw for the first time the structure of these machines, a flat ox cart frame underneath with the carriage body suspended on suspension above it for the comfort of the passengers. Brilliant.

Well worth the time to visit.

Rusty got his time around outside. It's a weird setting for a museum. It's plonked in the middle of a country club, between a swimming pool, a golf course and a bunch of private homes. 

We took off across country again and happened upon a lunch spot, underneath a raised portion Interstate 10. We got a bit muddled in our mapping and pulled over. As always Rusty wanted to get out when the van stopped. 

Layne said this looks like a good spot for lunch. Thats what I mean about traveling by van. You have your home wherever you are. A prairie schooner. 

In this instance lunch was a couple of Czech savory pastries from Austin. Kolaches they are called, pulled from our fridge and heated in our microwave. Easy.

Lunch where you want: life on the road.

Austin, The Alternative Capital

To arrive in Austin by road requires you to drive through the world outside, a ring of fields and farms, suburban strip malls, and small town America. Austin is the capital city of the state that may be opening the road to the repeal of Roe versus Wade, a law change that has the news people all aquiver. On the ground such esoterica matter not that much when planning a visit to a city renowned for its food and music qualities. Austin is where we wanted to eat barbecue, listen to live music and perhaps even sit outdoors and drink local beer. Decadence personified. 

There is that by now well known aphorism to Keep Austin Weird, which to my mind if you have to consciously keep a place weird it's too late. However Austin does try to stay weird. The guy in the park plying the xylophone while wearing a "yachtsman's cap" may qualify. Earlier I saw him trying to comfort a homeless woman curled up in a ball sobbing hopelessly, the sort of homeless drama that caused tourists to breathlessly call 911 in Key West and we dutifully sent officers to calm down the usual suspects. By the time we had parked the van and paid three bucks for 90 minutes all was once again serene. When Layne took Rusty for a walk she saw dozens of elaborate shelters in the far reaches of the park.

One has to be aware of people in glass houses not throwing stones, but even from the perspective of a voluntary houseless van dweller it seems a bit much to turn a park into a camp. Is that part of Austin's charm or not ? I have no idea. Qw ate our lunch and moved on. There are many homeless in Austin, not the level notorious in San Francisco but I was reminded of the bad old days of tents lining South Roosevelt Boulevard one year in Key West.

A middle aged black guy driving an elderly Cadillac with chariot wheels worthy of Queen Boadicea, well that to my mind is weird. I've had enough flat tires lately not to want to put his rotating scythes to the test but there he was, stereo thumping a deep bass, as he spun his way down the highway, him and his sticky-outy hubcaps.. Decidedly weird.

One very normal facet of life in every modern urban agglomeration is heaps of traffic. Austin has tons of that and parking is at a premium and the city has all the usual joys of a modern cultured interesting city with expensive housing and too many would-be residents. It also has that music and food thing going on. I got in line.

I was the only masked person in the building but I was probably the only person in the building who has ever been ventilated so let us let them learn that pleasure on their own. Texas has given up on masks but the freedom to choose to wear one isn't a one way street.

I saw the sign above telling impatient customers not to help themselves and apparently the screen wasn't enough. The sign is old and curling so I expect manners haven't improved over time. The customer in front of me, a tall white man around 35 years of age maybe, turned abruptly and said: "You want me to step closer to them?" pointing to the line ahead of him. "I'm not going to."And with tat moment of defiance he turned his back on me. I pondered for a moment and said: "I was laughing at the sign," and I pointed to it. He looked at the signing looked at me and then said: "I don't meant o eb rude," and turned around again. Don't ask me to explain what was going through his unmasked head. I'm retired I wanted to say and no one's paying me to be your therapist. I simply waited my turn.

The line moved rapidly and efficiently. Mac-and-cheese to go one pint, creamed corn one pint, half a pound of brisket. Anything else? no job done. 

The place was packed and they don't take online reservations before one pm for some reason and they don't do curbside or anything remotely modern. The system has obviously been honed over the years since their opening in 2014 and it works just fine. They will even deliver to you across the country. 

There are two Blacks BBQ restaurants in Austin, one on Guadaupe Street near the University which calls itself proudly "The Original" and this one downtown by the river. Apparently it was family dispute between the Uncle who owns the very first restaurant in the town of Lockhart and forced his nephews who wanted to open a Blacks BBQ in Austin to change the name of theirs so they named it after their father Terry. Then the Lockhart Uncle decided to take them on and opened his place on Guadalupe Street. It reminded me of the period when there were two Sandy's Cuban Cafés on White Street in Key West.  Read the Black saga HERE.

We were busy unloading the loot I brought back to Butler Metro Park when a woman appeared on the doorway asking if we knew whether the Dougherty Arts center next door was open. We admitted our outsider status, houseless van dwellers in a permanent population of the park's unhoused. She was fascinated by us living happily in or tiny space and admitted she wanted to get her husband interested. He's an engineer so my suggestion was to get him worked up about designing the systems he wanted. Engineers over think things by their nature and giving them a problem to solve hooks them usually. At least it did among the sailing community its we used to navigate amongst. Candace, a native of San Diego, was shyly enthusiastic about her home of five years and you can see why. She is an oil painter by inclination and you can see her work on Instagram @livelyvibesdesigns.

We talked for a good long while about her life, her husband the immigrant, her career choices (I advised working for county or local government of course being pensioned myself) as well as life in Austin, an increasingly expensive town. For young people she said, and for us too I said thinking about the gentrification of the Keys. Her enthusiasm and appreciation for life put Austin in the plus column for us. And then there are local pastries.

We had read about kolaches after a reader turned us on to them and Layne discovered a bakery producing only kolaches next to a five star rated laundry. Life on the road requires work of the more mundane sort and we hadn't done laundry since Pensacola at Therèse's place. So we live like students once again...at the laundromat!

It does help to have your van parked outside so you can set your alarm and go take a nap in your own bed. I enjoy not taking responsibility for the machinery, like taking showers at truck stops and not having to worry about clean up and making sure the plumbing is working. Use it and leave it. Lovely.

We rounded out our day in Austin by shopping at Trader Joe's and having a German Lager at the Austin Beer Garden Brewery -ABGB. The beer was actually quite good and at 4.5% not at all harsh for my delicate palate. The music was pleasant but a bit distant for those of us sitting outside in an 80 degree evening. For the night we chose a scenic overlook 15 minutes outside the city on Highway 360. It was not the best possible choice. At three in the morning a group of lost souls showed up paling loud music followed rapidly by some desperate character playing a thumping loud bass for an hour. Layne put in her ear buds, Rusty snored and I read. The wind of the arriving cold front picked up and the frustrated youth packed up and left.

To spenda. day in Austin leaves you wanting more and after the plague finally abates we will return as there is much more to see and do. There is a reportedly rather splendid park called Emma Long with RV parking at reasonable cost but with a website that defies being able to make a reservation. In my head we will spend a few nights there and spend our days giving Austin the attention it deserves.

Next up: Kerrville and the Museum of Western Art and some thoughts on the Hill Country. Oh and a harvest host selling cider among the vineyards.

Texas Oil Man

This log entry finds me near Pflugerville, east of Austin, on an overcast warm humid morning. We are told the weekend will see strong winds, rain and cold temperatures ushering in a strong cold front. It won't be that cold we tell ourselves looking at forecasts down to 35 degrees at night. We are used to it. We shall see.  

Our journey to the capital of Texas took  us across the state by Highway 79 and Highway 54 mostly, a rolling flatland of farms, hedges, trees still dropping leaves and trucks, lots of big fast trucks. There were scenes of stark poverty, moldy trailers going green, some under tarps, inhabited because the family car was parked next door.

As always Gannet 2 stuck to the program and we kept rolling at 65mph and some gas mileage between 16 and 18 mpg. Layne uses gas buddy, a discount card to find cheap gas and we filled up in Shreveport at $2:64 a gallon and later in Lufkin we found gas at $2:79 and filled half a tank. Most gas stations advertise at $3:30 or more which I think will seem inexpensive compared to what awaits us in Mexico and California. 

Layne also got the Libby app which allows us to borrow library books at a nominal charge and we have been listening to a detective novel set in New Orleans in 1984 in the noir style of Dashiell Hammet and delightfully set in its period with much discussion of the civil wars in Central America and not a cellphone in sight.

It is a serene and untroubled existence and makes me think we might be good candidates for a journey to Mars, suspended in time and space away from the daily annoyances of workplace and news space and people "vexatious to the spirit" as the Desiderata poem much circulated in my youth used to have it.

We did manage to find a rural traffic jam after we stopped at the Target in Pflugerville. There we picked up some shopping brought to us in the parking lot, Covid style by an eager youth. Then we drove to the country to find our camp for the night, and the tiny road through the fields was blocked. I was ready to sit in traffic and drink a cup of tea but the locals were making u-turns and fleeing the scene. I found a pull out, turned the van and we made our own detour. Thank you Google. It was a path of much rumbling and shaking and some truly weird death defying cambers on the back roads but we ambled through the afternoon sunlight, detective Dave Robichaux in New Orleans silenced in his pursuit of ex-contras killing people. We had to concentrate to find our way through these back roads.

Dell's Favorite Texas Olive Oil was our destination, a Harvest Host. These are small businesses across North America (I mean to include Canada) that invite RVs to spend one night, no hook ups expected, no facilities and all for free. In return one learns about the business and you buy a product to support them. A brilliant program offered obviously though an app and never a misfire. We call ahead maybe a day or so and see if they have an opening and then show up and get a tour. We have a cider and a desert tour planned for next week.

Frank told us his story of transformation from Executive Chef to Oil Man. He spent 43 years working at Hyatt convention hotel kitchens and his wife insisted they figure out a new path for him in retirement as he, unlike me, would go mad with no obligations and nothing to do.

They had friends living east of Pflugerville in Elgin more precisely, and the friends knew of 30 acres for sale nearby. Their home in Houston sold unexpectedly fast so they, their horses cats and dogs all decamped to their new field and lived in an RV while they sorted out the retirement plan. Balls of steel in my opinion.

It turns out there are 260,000 olive trees in Texas and Frank's is one of the smaller ones at 1250 plants. They had a massive unexpected frost this February which killed off a lot of their trees and they had to order a whole lot more from California. There trees come as little twigs and two years later are producing oil which I find amazing. The oil is light and buttery and quite deliciously smooth. Frank has found his calling.

It was a carefully planned transformation to turn a chef into a farmer but as Frank sees it being a chef was hard work yet a lot easier than farming. You can't argue with nature and stuff happens that a chef can manage but a farmer can't. A chef switches suppliers if a product isn't available, a farmer watches drought or frost destroy a crop. He seems to thrive on the challenge and after living in 14 different cities during his career and cooking all over the world an olive oil orchard near Austin seems to suit him fine. His wife says they have built the home she will die in.

Traveling like this doesn't inspire me to want to go back to a farming life, but it does allow me to enjoy the ways others have found a bizarre and perhaps unexpected calling to fulfill. For some of these Harvest Hosts they have finally allowed themselves to do what they always wanted, while others like Frank stumbled on an unexpected new life.

He isn't alone as there are others around him growing olives and one of his neighbors wanted to control her own oil press so she bought one in Italy and got an Italian expert a visa to come to Pflugerville and press her olives for her and her neighbors. This is a whole sub culture developing here and I doubt any of the oilmen, tourists, students and native born people flooding the state capital nearby have a clue.

Frank deals with drought by pumping a couple of wells and storing water, and in dry years he has to order water by the truck load. It's not an easy life but the pair of them made the effort to tour Europe and tasted oils in Greece Spain Italy France and so forth and settled on two Spanish olives they wanted to grow in this new hard life. They found an advisor at Texas Agricultural and Mechanical university to guide them and they hire volunteers to come and pick olives each September. And they have their own harvest festival.

My family grows olives among other crops in Umbria in central Italy and my nephews have installed their own very modern olive press to make and sell their own oil. I fled that life 40 years ago and have no regrets though obviously it suit s a lot of people beside myself. I enjoy seeing people enjoy it.

In the 1960s and 70s I recall olives being picked much later, in December and January when frost was on the ground and olives were picked by hand. The pickers we hired carried A shaped ladders, pointed at the top so they would fit snugly among the branches of the olive trees which were much taller than these Texas bushes. The women would pick the olives and throw them in a basket they carried on their arm. One olive by one olive. Frank also picks his olives by hand but puts them through a sifter to remove leaves and debris.

The olive press of my childhood memories was a giant machine with two stone wheels powered by a motor that turned the big wheels of stone around and around forcing the oil out of the fruit. The olive press worked day and night for weeks, a huge series of rooms warmed by a wood stove and when I, he boss's son, visited they would cut me a slice of bread and toasted it on the stove. Then they would take the lightly charred bread and  drip freshly pressed oil on it, rub it with a ripe tomato so the flesh and seeds stuck on the oiled bread and finally they sprinkled big chunks of salt and handed it to me. In my later years this peasant snack has become a prized appetizer called bruschetta ("broo-sket-ta" with a hard K sound) in Italian restaurants.

Dell's Favorite is famous among Harvest Host reviewers for the quality of the bread you can buy to dip the oil in but Frank's supplier is  sick with Covid so supplies are cut off and one is left wondering why a small business would risk it's money flow for want of a free vaccine. We shall have to buy bread elsewhere and there are numerous German bakeries around Austin fortunately.

Harvest Host is a quiet and unusual place to spend a night, plus Layne has her Christmas gifts, so instead of paying to sleep among a crowd of RVs we slept among the olives and I have to say I was exhausted by 8:30 and passed out. Just discussing the job of making oil in Texas wore me out.

Rusty was free to roam but he hopped into the van as the sun went down and watched the world outside while we had dinner. 

Next up Austin where we believe we have found a suitable outdoor venue for music and perhaps a glass of beer. The German settler influence is felt strongly here.