Home to the Hill Country
ByTurk Pipkin
(originally appeared in Continental Magazine)
It seems like only a few years ago that I considered Austin to be one of America's great undiscovered treasures, a slacker haven of cool music and natural beautfy. Now widely regarded as one of the best places in America to do business, Austin has definitely changed. Young slackers have been replaced by new millionaires — fifteen thousand in the past five years alone — and natural beauty is giving way to houses and cars, so many of the latter that a local billboard reads, “Free Parking on Interstate 35.”
When I want to escape this growing madness, I generally take the time honored approach and head for the hills. Beginning almost on the edge of Austin and extending more than a hundred miles west and north, the Texas Hill Country is a beautiful land of oak and wildflower-covered hills, free-flowing rivers , small towns and big ranches. The animal and plantlife are so diverse that the Nature Conservancy has designated the Hill Country as one of just seven North Amerian bioreserves — one of the "last great places."
Having recently heard about a new fly-fishing lodge on the spring-fed Llano River, I grab a change of clothes and drive west out of Austin on Highway 290. Less than an hour later I’m pulling into Johnson City, the hometown of the Hill Country boy who grew up to be President, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Two blocks off the town's main square, I park at the Lyndon B. Johnson National Historical Park for a stroll through the former President’s boyhood home. Thinking of my own childhood in the Hill Country when I first knew of Johnson as a man my parents considered a borderline socialist, I walk across the street to the park's adjacent visitor center. There I move slowly from one display to another, reliving the story of Johnson's life spent fighting both for political power and for his dream of a better life for the common man. But like so many children on the sixties, I am not so fascinated by his War on Poverty or revolutionary legislation for health care and education as I am his ultimate failure to find a way out of the quagmire of Vietnam.
I never met Lyndon Johnson, but shortly after he died of a heart-attack in 1973, I lived in Austin’s Alamo Hotel (since torn down like so many of the funky old Austin landmarks to be replaced by something shinier). Just down the hall from my room resided Lyndon’s younger brother, Sam Houston Johnson, a drinking man who rarely left his quarters. Invited one night for a snooter of bourbon, I worked up the nerve to ask Mr. Sam what Lyndon was feeling those last months in the White house, a time when protestors outside on the street were chanting, “Hey, Hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”
“He was tired all the time, but he still couldn’t sleep,” Sam Johnson told me as he refilled his drink, "kinda like me.”
Five years later, Sam Houston Johnson was laid to rest not far from his brother and three earlier generations of their family in the cemetery of the LBJ Ranch. Still the home of Lady Bird Johnson, but also part of the National Historical Park, the ranch is just few miles down the road in Stonewall, Texas. I’d like to stop and pay my respects to Sam Johnson, but to drive onto the ranch alone I'd have to wait until the bus tours end at 5:00 p.m. Sving that for my next pilgrimage to the land of Lyndon, I instead stop at nearby Burg’s Corner, the local peach growers co-op where I eat a bowl of homemade peach ice cream and talk with a couple of ranchers about the Hill Country's most frequent topic, rain, or more precisely, the lack of it.
Five miles further, I pull over again, this time at the soaring limestone and cedar barn that headquarters Wildseed Farms, the world’s largest grower of wildflower seeds. Surrounding the farm's retail store and adjacent beer garden are 400 acres of blooming wildflowers, a stunning patchwork of blue, purple, yellow and red.
After buying a pound of Bluebonnet seeds, I head on to the Hill Country's most popular destination, the town of Fredericksburg, founded in 1846 in the heart of Indian country by German Immigrants who had an artistic knack for building beautiful cut-stone commercial buildings and picturesque wood-frame Sunday Houses.
Undergoing its own economic boom (the merits of which are hotly debated by the old-timers in the area), Fredericksburg’s Main Street is now lined by block after block of lovely antique shops, restaurants and even a brewpub. Avoiding the throng, I park a block off the drag and step into Lincoln Street, a top-notch wine and cheese shop with an old world feeling. With so many local ranches having been purchased by city folks with deep pockets and expensive tastes, Lincoln Street's owners Todd and Jodie Smajstrala are enjoying great success selling a wide selection of the world’s finest wines. But with Texas wines now winning numerous awards, I ask Todd for a recommendation and he pours me a glass of the 1999 Viognier from Alamosa Wine Cellars, a Hill Country vintner dedicated to making European style wines. Light and sweet, even at $27 a bottle this is the perfect accompaniment for an afternoon picnic.
Back on the road and in the mood for some Texas music, I tune my radio to KFAN — 107.9 on the FM dial — a local station known around the world (at www.Texasrebelradio.com) for its eclectic mix of Texas music from Johnny Ace and Johnny Winter to Robert Earl Keen and Guy Clark, who blasts into my truck with a rousing rendition of his song, "Texas Cookin'".
Suddenly ready for lunch, I head north to the Hoo Doo Cafe, a roadside diner in Art, Texas, another historic Hill Country town, this one with a population of two. Mayor and cafe-owner Randy Gaulding moved to Art a couple of years ago to escape the bustle of Austin and quickly found success serving grilled salmon, steaks, burgers and onion rings so good they'll bring tears to your eyes.
Eight miles down a dusty road from Art, I finally arrive at my destination, Raye Carrington's Inn on the Llano, a graceful fly-fishing retreat on the banks of the Llano River. One of the few remaining wild rivers in Texas, the Llano rises out of springs deep in the Hill Country and flows free and clear for over a hundred miles, much of it over granite outcroppings a billion years old. When I was a child, I spent every possible moment on my grandmother's ranch which encompassed the headwaters of the South Llano, the primary tributary of the main river. There my youth was dedicated to wading in cold gushing springs, fishing for largemouth bass, searching out majestic flocks of Rio Grande Turkeys and generally staying as far from civilization as possible. When I was sixteen, my family lost the ranch to drought and lawyers, and in the succeeding thirty years hardly a day has gone by that I haven't thought of that loss and felt the almost mystical pull of this river.
Raye Carrington also felt that wondrous tug. An old friend and bridge-playing partner of former Texas Governor Ann Richards, twenty years ago when she first cast a fly rod, Raye experienced a spiritual and physical epiphany. By the time her kids were grown, she’d become a Federation of Fly-Fishers Certfied Instructor and was dreaming of owning her own lodge when damage from a massive flood prompted a friend to sell this 20-acre property.
Now more concerned with drought than flood, Raye has added additional accomodations higher on the river bank, creating the kind of place where you could comfortably plop down for a week with a stack of good books and a few friends to swap those late-night fish stories.
Thinking it might be nice to catch a few fish before sunset, I grab my spinning rod and hurry to the river with Raye’s dog Peeper excitedly running ahead to make a flying leap at any small birds that might be endangering my safety. A quarter mile downstream, I hop across a long row of small rock islands and put myself well out in the main current, the primary haunt of the Llano River's version of a rainbow trout, the beautiful Guadalupe Bass.
On a stretch of river that’s fished by someone nearly every day of the year, I'm almost certain that I’ll be skunked, but instead have a dozen strikes and land a couple of small bass just as the sun begins to sink below the horizon. Ruling this a great success, I strip down to my shorts and ease into the clear, cool water where I float on my back, my gaze pointed skyward at hundreds of Mexican free-tail bats zipping to and fro just out of my reach. Mesmerized by their radar-guided acrobatics, I drift out into the current and feel myself being pushed downstream, wondering how long it would take me to float the forty miles till the Highland Lakes still these wild waters, knowing all the while that it's time to swim back.
Arriving outside my room well after dark, I stare up at the brilliant stars overhead, a dazzling display you'll see nowhere within fifty miles of the lights of Austin. But here in the Hill Country, the creamy Milky Way still stretches from horizon to horizon, just as it did in my childhood far upstream where these magical waters still rise up from out of the old rock.
The next morning I am still the little kid, wolfing down a plate of pancakes, then waiting impatiently for my promised fly-fishing lesson. Despite my inexperience with a fly rod, Raye seems confident that I'll soon be casting like an old hand. Step by step she takes me through pick ups and lay downs, roll casts (for use with obstructions behind me), false and off-shoulder casting, and shooting line for longer casts. With infinite patience she tells me again and again to wait at the end of my back cast, to quit breaking my wrists and to keep my rod tip up.
It’s only when we get to the double haul — a quick left-hand pull and release of the line during both the back and forward motion of the rod — that my coordination fails me. The intent of the double haul is to increase the line speed, but my only result is to repeatedly whack myself in the back with the line as I bring it forward. Apparently I respond well to a good whipping as wanting to avoid the pain quickly teaches me the correct action and I begin lofting the tiny fly far out onto the water.
“It's funny," Raye says as the lesson ends, "I expected to mainly be running a Bed and Breakfast; it was a surprise to find out how many people want to learn to fly-fish.”
"If you don't want to learn to cast a fly rod," I tell her. "It's only because you've never really thought about it."
In the deep shade of the lodge's front porch, I ask my teacher about the new line of Raye Carrington signature fly rods produced by the Quarrow Rod Company in Oklahoma.
“The first ones have just come in,” she says excitedly, unscrewing the brass cap from a black aluminum rod case and withdrawing a beautiful two piece rod.
Fitting the joints together, I feel the heft and flex of the rod, my mind shooting back to my grandfather on a small stream in Colorado and the graceful, effortless arc of his old split cane fly rod. Since that long ago morning I’ve always known that someday, somewhere, a fly rod would be placed in my hand and I would hear the words, “this one's perfect for you."