Bonus Chapter 3: Easter in the Middle of Nowhere
I have to confess, we hadn’t originally wanted to spend a full day and a second night in Fort Davis. We had originally hoped to spend three nights at a resort near Big Bend National Park, which I’ll talk about in more detail later in the TR. However, the resort was booked up due to the holiday weekend, so we ended up having to spend a day in Fort Davis to basically stall until we could move on. Our parents had stayed here before and knew the area, and they convinced us that there would be enough to see and do that we would be fine spending the day there.
Our home in Fort Davis was the
Indian Lodge in Fort Davis State Park, a historic pueblo-style lodge built in the 1930’s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. It was renovated and expanded in 1967. It’s the white building nestled into the Davis Mountains in the right-center of this photo.
It was fairly basic, as state park accommodations generally are, but was a nice place to stay and offered much nicer views than your average roadside motel.
We were in the two rooms to the right of the swimming pool. As always, the boys begged to be allowed to swim in the hotel pool, since hotel pools have magical properties that draw young boys to them like internet comments sections draw people who should never be allowed near a computer. It didn’t matter that the temperatures were going down into the low 60’s in the evenings—that was when the boys wanted to swim. Fearing hypothermia, we were the bad guys and said no.
The hotel also had a nice little game room. You could borrow board games and take them back to your room, or just hang out there, hoping the dodgy wi-fi would hold on long enough for you to send an email.
Both mornings we were there, we were visited by hummingbirds feasting on the blooms near our room.
We awoke early on Sunday. It was Easter Sunday, and flyers around town (and my parents) had informed us that every year, an Easter sunrise service was held on the grounds of the historic fort in town. It was held as a joint service by several of the churches in town. Unfortunately, none of the flyers informed us when the service was actually supposed to start. But, using our formidable deductive-reasoning skills, we figured it most likely started at sunrise.
Naturally, a dusty and rarely-used portion of my brain (i.e. the deductive-reasoning part) failed to remind me that they call it a “sunrise” service because Easter celebrates the rising of the “Son” (i.e. Jesus Christ) in his final victory over death, and that the end of the service is supposed to coincide with the sunrise, heavy with symbolic meaning. So, we arrived at the fort to catch roughly the last five minutes of the service. Oops. Happy Easter, everyone!
Well, the sunrise made for some nice light over the fort, anyway.
The fort wasn’t officially open to visitors yet, so we killed some time by driving a few miles to a wildlife range just outside of town. We got to see some antelopes grazing there.
After a little while, it was time to visit
Fort Davis National Historic Site for real.
Fort Davis was a frontier outpost constructed in 1854. It was built as a station for soldiers to defend a key trade route, the San Antonio-El Paso Road. Emigrants would travel this road on their way to the gold fields of California. The fort went through various periods of being occupied by both Union and Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, and remained active until 1891. It became part of the National Park Service in 1961.
First, we toured the visitor center. Drew’s favorite spot was the corner where kids could dress up as soldiers and carry around what he refers to as “a shooting gun”.
We also watched a movie on the history of the fort, which was probably filmed in the 1980’s and was notable only for the most hilariously random cameo I’ve ever seen in any filmed production. The entire movie about this barely noteworthy fort in the middle of nowhere was narrated by former L.A. Lakers basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. He even wore full western cowboy gear for his on-camera appearances and played the whole thing deadly straight. I couldn’t stop giggling trying to figure out how he had been recruited for the gig.
“Excuse me, Mr. Jabbar, could we have a moment of your time?”
“Forget it, I’m not doing any more Coke commercials.”
“But it’s not a commercial, it’s—“
“A basketball recruitment video? Something related to my talents and skills?”
“No, completely unrelated. The only reason your name came up is that I was literally dared to ask you on a bet. It’s a film—“
“Oh, I get it. Another great comedy classic, like ‘Airplane!’? Man, I loved doing that movie. It was so much fun.”
“No, this would be played completely straight. Almost monotone, like a senior thesis project.”
“What’s it about?”
“An old fort in the middle of nowhere in western Texas.”
“Hmm. What happened there?”
“Well…nothing, really. It was just kinda there until the army didn’t need it anymore.”
“This sound like the worst movie in the history of movies. Like, even worse than The English Patient. Why would anyone agree to this?”
“You can dress up like a cowboy.”
“YES! GET ME ON A PLANE!”
It was like hiring a TV chef to narrate your office Human Resources videos.
"Hi, I'm Guy Fieri, and let me tell you, your 401(k) plan is on point!"
We spent some time touring the grounds, seeing the various historic buildings where people slept and ate and got dressed and did all of the exact same things you and I do. The only difference is that these beds and tables and chairs were used by people over a hundred years ago. This makes them valuable and worth preserving, whereas the beds and tables and chairs you and I use are worthless pieces of junk and should be discarded as soon as possible. Of course, this meant my mom had to read every single sign about every single piece of furniture.
We got a photo of us all in our slightly-less-casual Easter finery.
After an Easter feast of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, we moved on to our afternoon attraction: the
McDonald Observatory. Being in the middle of nowhere, the Davis Mountains get terrifically dark night skies, so it’s a logical place to station an observatory. It’s part of the University of Texas at Austin and includes two massive telescopes—the Otto Struve Telescope, first dedicated in 1939, and the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, dedicated in 1997. This one is tied with a South African telescope as the fifth-largest in the world. Researchers from all over the world use these instruments to study the universe.
The visitor center offers a small museum and tours of the observatory. The tour even offers a chance to use a solar telescope to observe the sun (no glasses required). We wandered through the museum for a bit until it was time for our tour. My parents left to take Drew back to the hotel for a nap, assuring us that we would have a great time with the tour instead.
Shortly afterwards, the clouds began to roll in.
We moved into the auditorium to start the tour. Our guide arrived and greeted us. He introduced himself as Nerdy McDronerson, Ph. D., one of the scientists stationed at the observatory. And he was very sorry, but it was too cloudy for us to be able to observe the sun today. But that was ok, because he could tell us anything we wanted to know about the sun. And for the next hour or so, he did.
We all sat and fidgeted in our seats as Dr. McDronerson delivered a masterful doctoral dissertation on the sun, explaining the intricacies of quasi-periodic vertical oscillatory motion and detection while observing the macroscopic line-of-sight velocity and taking into account the chromosphere through their correlation coefficients and temperature fluctuations of solar flares sending propagating waves affecting the flux capacitor’s readings of isolated Pythagorean Theorem calculations that average out through molecular deconstruction of soylent green particles as explained by Newton’s Law and the appearance of both Khyber and dilithium crystals, notwithstanding the azimuth of the arc reactor producing massive sums of dihydrogen monoxide in the trigonometric solar reticle of my left butt cheek.
Look, I have no idea what he said. All I know is, I’m an engineer. Science and technology are my thing. And at some point, my brain switched over to the channel where I score the game-winning goal in game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals, much like the dad in Inside Out.
It took a full hour and a half before we finally made it up the mountain to the older telescope. The tour got a bit more interesting here. Dr. McDronerson (can I call him Nerdy?) was still going on about something or other, but in the meantime he handed my kids the controls to multi-million dollar pieces of research equipment.
I still have no idea what he said, but at least now we could watch my kids pushing buttons and spinning the telescopes, opening the huge sliding doors to the sky, or spinning the roof around. So that was fun.
We somehow managed to escape without destroying anything, and moved on to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope building. This telescope is much newer, larger, more expensive, and can see much farther into space. They didn’t let us touch anything in there.
By the time we staggered out of that building, we checked our watches and realized that it had been a full three hour tour. A three hour tour. And we were hungry.
We met up with my parents at the hotel, where they were shocked to learn that fighting with Drew to take a nap was actually the better end of the bargain. Then we drove into town, where once again we could only find one restaurant that was open. This time, it was the
Fort Davis Drug Store & Hotel, which boasted small diner and soda fountain right in the middle of their store. The menu basically consisted of burgers and fries and ice cream, but fortunately, that sounded like it would hit the spot.
The owners of this place clearly had a sense of humor, which as you know always bumps a joint up a couple of letter grades in my book. We were about to find out how much of a sense of humor they had.
We used our standard cost-saving trick of ordering water for everyone to drink (with a family of 6, this generally saves us $18 at every sit-down meal). Now, I need to explain something here. Julie is
weird quirky. You know how most of us (read: all human beings) like a nice, cold, refreshing drink? Especially on a hot summer day? Well, Julie doesn’t like that. She prefers her cool refreshing beverages to be warm, not-refreshing-at-all beverages. Room temperature, minimum. I can’t count the number of days when I’ve come inside the house sweating like crazy after mowing the lawn in summer heat, grabbed her water bottle and taken a long pull, only to gag in surprise after realizing I’ve just taken a big swig of bath water.
So, when Julie orders a glass of water, she always makes sure to specify: water, NO ICE. Ice is her kryptonite. Her mortal enemy. The Moriarty to her Sherlock Holmes. She has often tried to lobby our local representative to introduce legislation to ban ice from the United States. Our local representative has changed his phone number three times.
Well, on this particular Easter Sunday, as we ordered our greasy burgers and fries for a traditional fancy Easter dinner, Julie ordered her standard water, NO ICE. And it just so happened that the guy behind the counter was especially quick-witted, and got a huge kick out of this. So he started giving Julie a hard time.
“No ice? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before.”
“I don’t like ice,” Julie started to explain.
“Does the presence of ice somehow offend your sensibilities? Or are you unable to comprehend the sight of one material taking on two forms of matter in the same glass? What would happen if the ice were to somehow sublimate directly into a gas at the same time? Would that alter the shape of the universe as we know it?”
This guy was giving my wife crap and used “sublimate” in a sentence. I loved him.
In the end, Julie got her bath water, we got our food, and everything was right with the world once again.
We drove to the top of the mountain and tried to watch the sun set, but unfortunately it was kind of a bust that evening. Clouds obscured the view. But we got a photo of all of the kids looking like they enjoy each other’s company, so that was a win.
Coming Up Next: A National Park bigger than the state of Rhode Island that somehow remains one of the best-kept secrets of the National Park system.