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Chapter Eleven: At Home in the Limestone Hill Country
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Chapter Eleven At Home in the Limestone Hill Country J ohn Graves, in Goodbye to a River, calls this “hardscrabble country.” He ought to know; he lives here. And he’s right, that’s what it is. The soil is thin and rocky, the grass sparse, the brush mostly cedar. Not good country for farming. The earliest white settlers who stopped their wagons here during a sequence of wet years must have been dismayed indeed when normal times returned and they saw what it was really like. Twenty miles to either the east or the west the land is level and soft. But here on our rocky hills it’s more interesting, just so you don’t need to make a living from it. Somervell County (the second-smallest county in Texas) sits on the tip end of a northward finger of the Hill Country. There is a certain irony, then, in the fact that we’re here, since we considered and rejected the Texas Hill Country when we were first thinking about retirement and now here we are after all. Of course, what people usually refer to as the Hill Country is several hours’ drive to the south, but we’re in limestone hill country, nevertheless. We chose this place because it was only an hour or so from Doug’s place in Fort Worth, but also because Glen Rose seemed like a nice little town and, as a bonus, the landscape reminded us a little of New Mexico. I guess it’s the rockiness of the soil, the dry look of the vegetation , the quiet, the distance of the horizon, the big sky. Cedars are never my favorite, but they do look a lot like our junipers on the Cerro Espinoso. No piñons here, of course; they grow only at a cer215 tain elevation, in a certain climate. Here I look out the window beyond my computer screen into a crape myrtle. Right now, as I write, it’s in bloom and waving its branches in a strong wind. Humming-birds are visiting the blooms of the red yucca plant by the window, and a little tufted titmouse keeps flying into the crape myrtle . On beyond, just inside the pipe fence beside the driveway, there’s a big rock that the earthmoving contractor was going to push off the drop-off in back when he was smoothing things over at the end, until we asked him to leave it where it was. It reminds me of the guardian rock Angus pushed up beside the piñon in our gravel driveway . And just as before, I see nothing but woods across the road, though I know there’s a house hidden back in there. We like the slow, quiet pace of Glen Rose. There’s an open air produce market on the square in season and a pie shop that draws rave reviews. The Methodist church runs a thrift shop where I browse the racks for dollar skirts and quarter tops and keep an eye out for good jigsaw puzzles. We have two grocery stores and a senior citizens center where Loren and I could go play dominoes and eat lunch if we ever got around to it. There’s a bluegrass festival in the summer for folks who don’t mind the heat. True, there’s not a lot of choice in the way of restaurants, but we do have a good barbecue place. Actually, there are two barbecue places, but nearly everyone agrees there’s only one good one—though which one it is remains debatable. These days the hills that never afforded good farming are doing well as tourist attractions. Droves of people come here to camp, wade the rocky-bottomed Paluxy River (the second shortest river in Texas), and canoe the nearby Brazos. They drive through Fossil Rim, our really fine animal park and endangered species breeding facility, or try to make out the dinosaur tracks at Dinosaur Valley State Park. They browse our junk shops and antique shops. Tourism has brought a measure of prosperity to Glen Rose. But the biggest employer in the county is the nuclear power plant. We joke that you can tell Glen 216 this last house [18.232.188.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:01 GMT) Rose residents by their radioactive glow. Tax dollars generated by the plant in its early years improved the schools, built a nice little hospital , and renovated the fine old Somervell...