MORE AND BETTER TEXAS

I'm back in Texas now with my girlfriend, Jeane, and things are better.  Although it's only 47 degrees this evening and has been raining some, the last three days have been sunny and warm.  We drove down from Dallas to Waco to look at a property I own there, and ended up spending four nights at the best RV park ever.  It's owned by an archtypical Texan named Doye Baker ("No L in the name--Mah Momma never tole me where the name come from--Ah thank et was from some handsome train man, maybe").  Doye seems to have built or owned most of the commercial real estate in the area, including the one I own now, and he just built the RV park we're in, opening four months ago.  There are fifty-nine spaces right on the banks of Flat Creek, and the blueprints are three pages long:  one page for the site layout, one page for electrical, and one page for wastewater.

Texas gets a bad rap in California, but they do some things better than we do.  The schools are superb, for example.  Terri Martin, my friend in Dallas, sends her kids to an elementary school with 25 kids in a class, a modern and well kept structure, all the options that California has cancelled, and great teachers; kids with special needs get special help. They're building a brand new school nearby because enrollment is projected to increase.

The high schools look like California's Junior Colleges.

The infrastructure is constructed to keep ahead of building.  In Waco, and in other areas we passed through, freeway interchanges and roads are built--seemingly overbuilt--in the path of growth, certain that business and residential employment and taxes will follow.  In California it seems that the policy is to wait until growth has choked the roads and then try to widen them piecemeal.

There are signs of growth and economic activity everywhere--road construction, commercial building, residential development--things California seems to have given up on.  There's an optimism, too, that there is a future for people here, and there's a kindness and politeness that's real and refreshing. And no state income tax; California's now tops 11%.  Property taxes are higher than California but the money is used well.

Doye has made the RV park a charming and remarkable place.  Laid out on the creek in the center of a 650 acre spread, the 59 spaces curve in an arc that ends at a building called the Scale House, where grain used to be weighed.  The Scale House is a homey structure with a fully equipped kitchen featuring all Jenn-Aire appliances, two bathrooms, two living rooms, and covered porches.  It's left open 24 hours a day for RV'rs use, and although we made it our office and cooking area we were seldom disturbed by others.  Nearby is a laundry room with brand new free--free!--washers and dryers.


THE SCALE HOUSE

Outside the Scale House are some of Doye's vehicles, which include, among other things, a 1911 White dump truck with solid rubber tires and remarkably preserved wood detailing, and a startlingly large hand cranked dump bed.  It was the first dump truck made in America but looks like something from the '30's.

He also has a 1948 Kaiser luxury car and a 1939 LaSalle that looks like Bonnie and Clyde's getaway car.

Four peacocks and one peahen have the run of the place, cadging handouts from anyone passing.  They are so beautiful it's hard not to try to draw them near.  Nothing in nature is as distinctly blue as a peacock.

 I asked Doye how they taste and he said that if they keep pooping on his cars he might find out.

Doye runs about a hundred head of beef cattle on the ranch, but since rain has been sparse the grass is thin, so he took them over to "the other spread.  'Bout eleven hundred acres."  This spread has twelve man made lakes stocked with bass and perch, and a great number of sheep with very little wool.  The breed is for meat only, Doye explains, and their meat is considered a delicacy by Texas' increasing Asian population.  The adult sheep are not large, and their lambs, of which we saw many, are adorable.  The flock is guarded against coyotes by three sizeable and friendly Pyrenee-Andalusian mixed breed dogs.

Doye and his wife Esmeralda are gregarious and generous.  They insisted on lending us their Chevy, so new it doesn't even have plates yet, every day we wanted to go to town to the YMCA, bank, or whatever.  They spend a lot of their time working with a church that supports the homeless and missions in poor countries.  Wonderful, salt of the earth people.

NEXT: SAN ANTONIO