Quiet day. Walked. Ran. Watched birds. Ate. Tormented armadillos. Drove the Jeep thirteen miles to town. Survived a satellite hookup challenge. Watched some football. Outdoor dog washing. Indoor blow drying. Visited with our only neighbors (they’re from Colorado too). A high of 75 degrees. Calm weather. A nice day.
The ranger told us story after story about Texas. Unsolicited. He insisted in fact. He didn’t seem very busy. He told us about Texas longhorns, Arbuckle coffee, peppermint candy, soft tissue, Comanche Indians, Mexican slaves. The capture/capture/recapture of the settler’s child by the Indians, then back from the Indians by the settlers twenty-five years later, then by the settlers again after she escaped them to go back to the Indians. And a ghost story. A really bad ghost story. And boy scouts. And the ampitheater. They had an amiptheater until they got boy scouts. Now they don’t have an ampitheater anymore. It’s a logical sequence of events. The boy scouts spotted a rattlesnake. So they chased it into some rocks. They couldn’t get it to come out of the rocks, so they set the dry grass that was mixed in with the rocks on fire to flush it out. It still wouldn’t come out, so what else could they do but keep adding more fuel to the fire until they were successful? Maybe they were after their “persistence” merit badges. The wind came up. The ampitheater went up in flames, as did the rest of that section of the park.
Checked the weather forecast. It is going to get colder here. It is going to rain to the east. We’d better go south.