Wyatt's World
With the delta variant winding down, Ginny and I headed to Texas for a week-long trip – our first trip in what seems like forever.
I was excited because this was a fivefer, meaning we were going to knock five things out at once. Visit my 94-year-old aunt, visit my sister, visit my son, attend the wedding of my cousin and go to Austin City Limits music festival.
We thought about driving, but in the end decided to fly. It truly is amazing how you can organize all the logistics of a multi-leg trip in just a few minutes on the Internet. I find pessimism about the future hard to comprehend when I experience such advances in technology.
The flight was a piece of cake. Jackson to Houston, Houston to San Antonio. Other than wearing a mask, flying is the same as always. Security is getting better and faster, thankfully.
The Emmerichs have a long standing connection with Texas. My father, having failed to get my Depression-wary grandfather to expand our family newspaper company, went to the big city as editorial page editor of the Houston Chronicle. At the time, the Chronicle had 500,000 paying subscribers and was the largest circulation newspaper in the south. As the editorial page editor, back in the day when newspapers wielded tremendous power, he was a big deal.
Meanwhile my father’s sister, Fae Emmerich Hardy, married a neurosurgeon who located to San Antonio. They had five children who then had 16 children (my first cousins) thus my Texas clan.
Unlike me, my sister never took to Mississippi and returned to Texas for college and stayed. After my father’s death in 1995, my mother moved to Texas to be with my sister and aunt, so all these strong childhood connections were renewed and have stayed strong ever since.
My son Lawrence gravitated to Texas because of this. Austin is a favorite destination of our youth and that’s where he landed. He worked while earning credits at Austin Community College and is now a junior at Texas State with, thank you Lord, in-state tuition.
It has been quite interesting having a Mississippi-Texas connection. Just a few hours drive apart, Mississippi is one of the slowest growing states and Texas is one of the fastest growing states.
The heyday of Texas wildcatting no doubt has a lot to do with this. Cowboy frontier mentality merged with rugged individualistic entrepreneurship. The result was huge wealth and a culture permeated with a can-do spirit that is driving one of the most powerful economic engines in the world. It’s impressive to watch. I see this same spirit ingrained, in varying degrees, in all my cousins.
Mississippi has a different culture – more wary, more traditional, more jaded. That’s what happens when you go from being the wealthiest state in the country to being an impoverished victim of a huge bloody civil war. We are indeed influenced by our history.
I found my aunt, whom I adore, in great health at 94, alert, charming, still driving. We talk at least once a week and it was good to hug her. My father used to tell me his sister was “a nut,” probably because she had five children, but I find her to be one of the wisest, kindest people I have ever known.
It was Aunt Fae who told me how to get along well with my mother, who could be a handful. “Just do whatever she tells you and agree with everything she says.” It worked and my mother’s last words to me were, “You are the best son a mother could ever have.”
First stop was my sister in Utopia, Texas, 90 minutes drive due west of San Antonio. You would think it would get dryer heading west but it actually turns lush and green thanks to the ubiquitous cedars, actually ash junipers.
They live on a 1,000-foot hill with a magnificent view. They moved to Utopia, population 167, after their previous home, Roundtop started attracting the Houston wealthy and got too busy. Their goal is to be totally off the grid. Brother-in-law Steve has installed solar panels on their storage structure with four Tesla batteries. They consume no electricity from the grid. Their return isn’t much, maybe three percent, but if the $15,000 Tesla batteries drop significantly in price, this could be an attractive option.
I don’t buy into their seeds and bullets, doomsday mentality, but it’s pretty cool that technology actually allows them to be self sufficient in the middle of nowhere. Even so, they believe Utopia will boom and are buying land at prices Mississippians would find astronomical. If our land would sell at those prices, our state would be rich!
I looked up the juniper ash and turns out its berries are edible, a fact unknown to my sister and brother-in-law. I proposed that we create a tourist destination selling our own local gin (which is made from juniper berries) and juniper jam on toast points.
The wedding was at Poco Loco, a 400-acre ranch bordering the gorgeous Guadalupe River. My uncle purchased this land 60 years ago and now it’s worth a small fortune. Miraculously, they have kept it all in the family.
We all boarded buses at the Alamo Heights Methodist Church parking lot. The weather radar showed an isolated whopper of a storm heading right for the wedding site just at the time vows would be taken. Miraculously, it broke up just 30 minutes before arrival, making for a gorgeous ceremony and night.
It is a gift of being older to see the whole clan grow and another beautiful generation emerge. Life is a miracle.
From there we went to the Austin City Limits music festival. We were on our feet for nine hours in 90-plus weather. Ginny and I held up as well as Lawrence and his three-year girlfriend Morgan. They were most impressed and we had a blast.
The next day we toured the beautiful, huge Texas State campus in New Braunfels, which is 20 minutes between both Austin and San Antonio. Talk about a booming area. Texas State was President Lyndon B. Johnson alma mater. I’ve never seen a campus built on the sides and top of a large hill.
Such a pleasure to see Lawrence, who was a wild child, transform into a polite, gracious young man. Praise the Lord. The Bible doesn’t give much parenting advice, but “fathers don’t embitter your children” is all you really need.
There is one aspect to this trip I will never forget. As I was rushing to leave my house and depart, I heard a crash. My crucifix, which I won in a golf scramble, had fallen over. It gave me a chill. What did that mean? I picked up the crucifix, kissed it and remembered to pray for travel mercies.
Days later, at my sister’s, I was hesitant to meet my cousin and his wife for dinner in Boerne. It entailed a long drive home on a windy, two lane road through the mountains. “This would be just my luck,” I joked, “to die in a head-on collision just when life is going so well.”
Hours later, in the dead of night, Steve turned around a bend and slammed on the breaks, barely missing a headon collision with a car in our lane.
The car was stopped dead still, lights on, an incapacitated drive slumped behind the wheel. We woke him up long enough to get his car off the road and called the sheriff. If the car had been moving at any speed, we could have all died.
Wyatt Emmerich is publisher of The Northside Sun in Jackson and owner of Emmerich Newspapers.