HICKORY PASS RANCH #6

SOCIAL OUTING & KRISPY KREME DOUGHNUTS -- DAYS 8 & 9

By © Russ Barnes.  All rights reserved: text. Photo credit: Krispy Kreme.

July 15, 2008, Tuesday Substantially revised “Red Dog Dirt” play to thirty pages.  I’m having characters crossover from "The Meeting Place of the Living and the Dead" setting and the "Hallucinatory Past" setting.  The border is permeable.  Very little narrative left.  Almost all dialogue.  Should come out to the same number of pages: somewhere between 90 and 110 which means a play of about two hours including intermission.  Heard from Robbin this morning from McAllen, Texas.  Should be home tonight in Rockville.  Look for a report on the tomatoes.  Did a laundry by hand and hung them on a ranch fence to dry.  After all it has been a week and Karen visits me tomorrow.  

WHAT I PACKED FOR THE JOURNEY

I travel light. A pair of shorts, a pair of jeans, a bathing suit, 4 pair underwear. two pair socks, two pull-over shirts, an Hawaiian shirt, a tee-shirt, old tennis shoes, hiking boots, topsiders, a few vitamins, and a minimum of grooming products.

Rain predicted for late afternoon.  So I decided to take the bike out at noon.  Hot!  But it was partly cloudy; so I got some relief.  Round-trip it was about 12 miles. Two killer hills! 90 percent of trip on bulldozed rocky, rough road.  Went back through the ranch to an area called, “Central Pen.”  When I first heard that, I thought it must be a branch of a Pennsylvania State College.  But, no, it was a central place to corral animals.  There was a big old windmill there, still rotating, but doing no work.  

There was quite a kind of prison aviary there with cow birds which prey upon Golden Cheeked Warblers which are an endangered species unique to the ecology of Balcones Canyonland of which Hickory Pass is a part.  The ranch has an agreement with the U.S. Park Service to protect the Warblers.  These apparently rogue cow birds had quite an excitement seeing me approach.  


Cruising by bike, my heart rate stayed at about 128 beats per second.  Not bad, but my energy crashed on the last two hills up to the top of the ranch house, and had to push part of the way.  Further, I couldn’t get two of the ranch gates open with the combination lock.  So I had to lift the bike over the fence and then climb over the fence myself.  Tumblers probably need lubrication.  Drank half a gallon of water upon arrival at the guest house.

DOUGHNUTS LEFT BEHIND

July 16, 2008, Wednesday.  Big social day.  Karen comes out from Austin to visit.  Brings Buddy her dog.  Go down to look at Cow Creek Pool.  Long talk.  She loves being out in the country.  Go to Marble Falls to shop at HEB and we had lunch at a place that has internet.  Downloaded all my email and haven‘t read it all yet.  At lunch I asked Karen about Joe.  And she said, while there is the outdoorsman he-man aspect to Joe, there is also a New Age side, a sensitivity that is almost feminine.  To wit, his raising son, John, from almost birth to adulthood.  


I point out that Jung posited that each sex contains the other sex in a minority position within itself.  And when the dominant sexual persona is in good communication with the minority sexual persona, then a man becomes more of a man, not less.  And a woman becomes more of a woman, not less. One of the problems, I perceive, in the sexual relations in America.  American writers are notorious for not always being able to convincingly portray the opposite sex.  

Leaving the restaurant after the internet session, we find in the parking lot that Karen’s Miata has a flat tire.  We change it with the truncated spare in the parking lot.  Stop and fill the tire to 45 psi.  Lying on my back on the hot asphalt, I comment, I’m getting too old for this s**t.”  When Karen departs the guest house, she leaves several Krispy Kreme doughnuts -- which I eat.  I had sent from the restaurant my revisions of the play script to Director David Maslow in Pittsburgh for his review over the internet.

To be continued tomorrow

Go to sequel: #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #7, #8