Nobody Died That Night.

Okay. So, this likely won't be the best post, but since I called the bank twice, worked on my pathetically useless-in-Texas resume, vented about the insensitive wang I work for, talked to my ex-husband about an LLC, went shopping at the world's most fashion challenged Walmart, friended ancient peoples who mean fuck all to me on facebook, smoked the cheapest cigarette in the Universe, drank some timeless Miller Lite and talked to my schizo-affected kid-glove brother... I feel as if I have accomplished enough to write a quick post about the past weekend's camping trip.

We went to Lake Livingston. I haven't been there in 20 years. I remember it being a really great park. I remember hanging my feet off of the small dock, breaking moonlight in the lapping water with my pre-teen toes and catching perch in a large hand held net. It seemed busy with people but not chaotic. I don't remember there being an equestrian stable and trails back then, and I am pretty sure there was wildlife wandering through the campsites.

This time around, Lake Livingston might as well have been Jones lake and I mean that in the harshest sense. It was thrashed from Ike and no real effort had been made to clean up camp sites. Our tent spot was 40 feet from a road, where cars careened along all night disrupting our sense of "getting away." There was no wildlife at all except a black and white housecat, one squirrel, one lizard and a white pomeranian. There was no fish to be seen, except for one fat carp who sucked on a dock piling while all of us losers tried to bait him with worms and plastic fantasy-looking neon creatures. It was sort of like ten fat but somehow still hungry bruiser cosmetologists- desperate to lay their magic on an unlipsticked up Gar, because they were starving for protein and had something to prove, all swinging their lipstick over the side of an abyss from strings that had no future in success as far as dolling up some protein... I didn't see anyone catch a thing and this included people with 10 ton tackle boxes in lawn chairs who probably lived on the lake. Every ten minutes we heard what sounded like a peacock having an orgasm, and never actually identified the creature making the sound, but suspect it was a slave girl being held by the Mooks over at less primitive camp sites. Less... primitive... sites.

You can't really choose who your camp neighbors are going to be, and I guess this is always a gamble. We didn't have to deal with truckloads of high school losers enjoying their first beers. There weren't children fighting over things. There weren't loud belt tugging veterans speaking over each other with greater stories... But there was a strange group of men who set up camp shortly after we did. At first brushings, I thought that there were two leaders in a group of adult-disability-veteran-community little brothers program. Half of their camp seemed awkward and the other half seemed almost obnoxious in their know-how.



Nothing seemed special about them the first night. We made jokes that they were homosexual-as you would expect of us- and there was little fanfare. The next morning, we awoke to what we thought was a message. Someone had placed a burnt human limb in the driveway entrance to our site. Later, as we were sitting around having dinner at our campfire (looking sideways at the charred limb a few feet away) John was playing some fine acoustic metal songs, and the man-group camping across from us started playing a goat horn and singing in hebrew. yes. They did. So, I had to sing my Amy Grant "El Shadai" which I learned in vocal training to be obnoxious.... I don't think that really did much for me or anyone else for that matter. Learning that song or vocal training that is. Nobody died that night.



We left camp early on Sunday, with no luck at fishing, and no groovy wildlife experiences to take home with us. We decided to do some small town off-roading and check out Swartwout, which was a Ghost town down the road. Nothing too special there. It was meant to be Polk County's original county seat- but Livingston somehow won that deal. The history involves a somewhat interesting tale of the settlers and developers and their political schemes and failures. The church is the coolest building that we saw, and it was pretty neglected even though services were being held in an adjacent structure by a local Methodist? group. Back woods effort to take care of that historical marker sucked polar dick to be sure. Sad.




We hit the road and had to stop when we saw a beautiful cat perched upon a rotted pole at a Goodrich, Tx "intersection" across from "City hall". John said, " Look. Cat." and since I am an animal lover without animals-- I forced John at gun point to stop so I could pet that cat. The cat wasn't having any of me, and it ran into a dilapidated building with a sign above it. "J.A.Young & Sons Grocery and Market". I took off my flip flops, put on my muddy boots and made my way through the brush to look into the busted windows, while John parked the car.






I had a moment to myself to look inside the property, before I beckoned John to join me. It was crazy. The cat had disappeared somewhere into a mess of abandoned organic squalor. The floor was covered in trash. There were cat prints on the wall next to a last supper print. A miniature christmas tree sat on top of a bird cage stand in a corner, but center stage to it all, was a piano that had been neglected.

I took some photos and we jetted before having dogs loosed upon us from a neighbor.

About ten or twenty minutes later, we saw another house that needed inspection. I call it inspection. You call it trespassing. We all benefit. This property speaks for itself when you look at the exterior. You have to look inside right? You can't just drive by a place like this that has open doors and no windows and not look. You can't. Well, I can't. Here's the pictures.






After stopping and spending about 1/2 an hour here, we hit the road only stopping twice more on the way home. We stopped at Buster McNutty's for shitty food- when we had expected so much more, and we stopped at Huntsville State Park which was very nice. All I could think of was getting home though so I could research the two properties that I had taken pictures of.

What I learned about the Grocer/Market, was that the original owner was a grandson of one of Livingston's founding members who was a Methodist minister. The original owner had passed away, as had likely his sons, and I found a record of his grandson having passed away in 1998. Who owns that property now, is a mystery to me. Who owned that piano.. a bigger one.

The small homestead we stopped and took pictures of off of hwy190, belonged to William Hillhouse. I believe he was born in December 1927, and passed away in January of 2000. He was a disabled veteran and from what we could gather based off of information we unearthed-- was that he was in the air force's 30th communications squadron and worked with code breakers in Omaha Nebraska in the 1950's. I think he has at least one surviving son in Goodrich of the same name, but his house sure did indicate that no one in his family cared.

I failed to mention that before we made it home, we stopped at the carnival on I-45 so I could take some pictures. If we hadn't of stopped, we wouldn't have discovered where Stacey (the singer from The Cows) was now working.



I think he may even be this lady's BRUSBAND.




I have additional photos and brief stories to share in an additional post, about our excursions into the realm of shitty resale shops and more.

TOMORROW=BUTTERNUT SQUASH SOUP, but what did I learn on this trip?

Trespass.