cities of the dead
Music: Chillout 2003: The Ultimate Chillout
This, my friends, is the world's largest Jackalope. Or so the sign says, and you can sit on him for a dollar. He was the featured attraction at the Pioneer Emporium Cowboy Museum in Pioneer Town, a roughly two-acre development that was built in Wimberley, Texas following the second world war. The town extends two blocks, beginning with a charmingly anachronistic shack built out of coke bottles (you could peer inside the front door and see a model train that clearly had not been operated in twenty years). There's a saloon, a bank, an operative two-room hotel, a game room, and other necessities (tellingly, there was no brothel).
In addition to the hammock and hot tub lounging, Pioneer Town was the highlight of my and Brooke's three day "vacation." We vowed not to work the whole weekend and do a lot of nothing. We watched trashy television (Flava of Love 3 on VH1); we peered off the back porch at the waterfall behind our cabin; we hot tubbed with margaritas (which is apparently a no-no); we cooked dinner; we played Scrabble, and so on. But Pioneer Town was just the sort of David Lynchian feature that got me excited and troubled, the apex of our much too brief vacation: this place may have been popular in the 50s, but now it is literally a ghost town. I know there is a lot of literature out there on tourism and ghosts, but still: I think there's a lot to say about the assumptions behind such a strange amusement, assumptions about whiteness and values and . . . getting a haircut.
You cannot enter the buildings, but rather, must peer through plexiglass to see what is going on inside the them. We caught a mannequin cheating in a poker game (he was also missing two fingers). We spied a family getting ready for bed (or something like that). But the creepiest was the man getting a haircut and a shave. Someone had glued fake hair to the man's face on one side to simulate some hair-action. And then we discovered the barber's hand had---terrifyingly!—fallen off.
I was haunted by this hand in a dream last night, in fact. Fortunately, all I have to think about is this breath-taking art that was in our bedroom and peace is restored.
The people of Wimberly were nice, just like small-town folk. The town square is supposedly full of antique shops, but really, it's just knick-nacks and other useless detritus (you know, angel sculptures, wreaths, random signs to hang in your home that read "peace," or "happiness"). Two of my favorite sound bites of the day: Brooke and I are entering a Western weapon and jewelry shop. Two middle-aged women are looking at a display outside, and one of them sits in a lounge chair made out of branches: "Oh Baaaaaarrrrrrrb, you just gotta sit down. This is sooooooo comfortable." She was serious. Second bite: Brooke and I want to go to a thrift store on the edge of town. We near the door, and discover that although Wimberly depends on tourism to survive, the shop closed at 2:00 p.m. It was 1:54 p.m. An elderly lady hobbles by holding a lamp on her way to her car. She says, in a you-should-know-better tone: "I'm sorry, we're closed. It's Saturday in Wimberly!"
One night we ate at one of the worst restaurants I have ever dined in, Juan Henry's, on River Road. This was two restaurants---a steak house and a Mexican place---that was combined under one roof. I had fahitas that consisted of microwaved fahita meat from the previous day. What was surprising, though, is that the place was absolutely slammed with people (standing room only in the waiting room). Small towns [sigh].
Finally, one of the biggest surprises of our vacation was CNN. I do not have cable, and have not watched cable since I last traveled for a conference (which was, uh, NCA a year ago). On Sundays I am addicted to Meet the Press and so on, and we didn't have any local networks. So I turned to MSNBC. Informercial. I turned to CNBC. Show about India's economy. I turned to CNN. They were discussing Lindsay Lohan. I turned to CNN's Headline News: Hurricane Dean is coming. Then, the "lead" story was about a woman who dirtied her wedding dress at a county fair in Iowa. I was dumbfounded: what happened to the news? I mean, I cynically teach this stuff in class, but I had no idea cable news had become that bad.
So we drove home Sunday, two days too soon both of us thought. I bought a new garden gnome in Kyle, Texas. I'm painting him this week. He should be properly installed in my garden before the first day of class.
Gallery of our trip here.