Winter in the South

The Gulf of Mexico

There's a small campground on Dauphin Island, a mile off the coast at Mobile, Alabama. We spent a week there, enjoying the warm weather, the relaxed atmosphere, and especially riding the scooter around the island. I found a little cafe that serves freshly-caught seafood, and really liked their seafood gumbo. There was a small grocery that had a huge hardware department and served as the island's general provisioner and DVD rental. The only local entertainment or excitement consisted of watching the ferry load and unload its cars. It was peaceful and restored us after our mad dash away from frigidity.

We resumed our travels, heading west across Mississippi and Louisiana, staying near the coast for warmer weather. But not too close — hurricane Ivan had damaged coastal Louisiana only three months before.

Texas

In Houston, we stayed with my college roommate, who graciously let us park Cruisemaster in his driveway. He regaled us with tales of Hurricane Ivan, the third most destructive hurricane to hit the US mainland. He had defied the evacuation warning and stayed home to mind his house. The hurricane made landfall at Galveston, breaching the seawall and devastating everything there, before moving inland, passing directly over Houston, and smashing lots of glass in downtown skyscrapers. He and his house survived the hundred-mile-an-hour-plus winds, with only a couple of holes in the roof where tree branches crashed down. He bought a chain saw and cut up all the trees that had fallen. Flood waters reached part of his back yard, but fortunately his house was on slightly higher ground and narrowly escaped flooding. He was without electricity, phone, or Internet for two weeks, and the crew that finally showed up to restore power had come all the way from South Carolina to help. We were glad he was alive and safe and in good cheer.

In Austin I met up with another college roommate who took me in his car for a grand tour of the area. It so good to connect after many years and catch up on what had happened to us, where we had lived and what we had done. He recommended the Texas Hill Country to us, so we headed there next and enjoyed the gently rolling hills. We relaxed and poked around the small towns there, Fredericksburg and Kerrville. I found good Texas barbecue throughout the Hill Country — in each new town, it was simply a matter of locating it. Yum!

Victoria is farther south and east, a medium-sized town we had visited briefly a year earlier. This time we decided to spend a month in Victoria and get to know it better. Its chief attraction for me was the tiny UU church with only a dozen or so attending on Sunday mornings, but nonetheless full of energy and good cheer. They took me in and made me feel welcome, not only at the services, but also for lunch afterward, for poker on a Friday evening, a barbershop chorus concert, and at a live theater production downtown, the musical "Do Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?" in which one of the UUs had a part.

I learned that the area is largely Hispanic, but not due to recent migration across the border — quite the opposite! Hispanics have lived in the Victoria area for many generations, tracing their ancestors back to original land grants, when Texas was part of Mexico. They are not dishwashers and gardeners here, they are prosperous middle class, respectable owners and staff of the town's businesses, the fabric of the town.

Next we spent a week on the Texas Gulf Coast at Rockport, just south of a whooping crane wildlife sanctuary. The whooping crane, one of the rarest birds in North America, is, of course, an endangered species. In 1941, there were only 21 birds living in the wild; today, about 250 birds make the annual migration from Canada to Texas. (There are also about 50 birds in a new breeding population that follow ultralight airplanes from Wisconsin to Florida.)

Molly Ivins once told a story about a Texas politician who went duck hunting and shot a whooping crane by mistake. A whooper, she observed, is about five feet tall. Your average duck, not so much. Do we want anyone in government who can't tell the difference?

I took a boat tour of the refuge, led by an avid birder, and saw more different bird species in one afternoon than I'd seen in the previous few years. Whooping cranes are shy birds, but we were lucky to get close enough to two pairs to observe them with binoculars and photograph them as they poked about in the mud looking for crabs to eat.

And then we began a slow retreat from our winter quarters, heading north and east.