Tomorrow I compete at Kerrville Folk Festival, in what has got to be one of the more important performances I’ve ever had to make. Last night, we crashed with my brother and his fiancé, Del, and their charming beast Pica. A good, relaxing way to spend the night before heading out on route 10 again, soon leaving Houston as nothing but a memory of traffic, a bad smell, and a lingering haze in the rearview mirror.
The travel on 10 is something I wish we could do for another couple hundred miles past Kerrville. The land just changes so dramatically, from East-cost almost-jungle to the bayous of Louisiana, where Interstate 10 is nothing but platforms of concrete and steel floated on the surface of swamp and mud. I’d never seen anything like that – highway with no trace of solid ground in sight. Dark stains on the concrete pylons show almost frightening levels of high water from the not-too-distant past, and Del tells us that during some of the hurricanes last year, water came up high enough that some of the highway platforms got inundated and simply floated off their supports. A section of 10 in downtown New Orleans is still being repaired. If we could travel another couple of hundred miles past Kerrville, perhaps we’d see places where they can’t even imagine of such a problem. Heather’s never seen the desert.
Between earthquakes and tsunami and flooding and famine, it’s a wonderful we’ve managed to cover the world as effectively as we have.
Interstate 10 on Memorial Day Weekend is an unending stream of campers and out-of-state license plates. The sun is merciless in its attempts to undo our air conditioners, and the Saturn pushes Westward through air that I’m almost afraid to sample. We’ve heard reports of thunderstorms at Kerrville, inviting mosquitoes and chiggers into the air, but hopefully cooling the air to a bearable 65 degrees. No sign of that here (midway between Houston and Austin) where vegetation still thrives under a coating of dust, and cows cluster in the shelter of the shade.
I’m sneezing steadily, and I’m nervously eating oatmeal cookies. Exit 637..150 exits to go.
And Houston wishes us luck as we depart for the Kerrville Folk Festival.
