Ken, at age 15, was the usual malcontent teenager. Kip, only two years behind, was not quite as easily vexed as his brother; or at least he did not exhibit the tendency as readily, although they continued to have their own sibling conflicts when Karen and I were not in the immediate area. Or was it arena? Nevertheless, I thought it would be appropriate for the three of us to experience a mutual, week-long vacation. The boys wanted to see the real Texas with its real cowboys – and maybe an Indian or two. They certainly had not yet encountered anything that resembled what was found in the movies claiming to have been made in their new state.
I did have a plan for an attempt to keep Ken from griping about the places we might see when we traveled to West Texas. Perhaps Kip would go along for the ride. He would have the entire back seat of the Pinto to himself, as Ken rode shotgun.
My plan was very simple. Ken was to determine which places we would see and where we would stay. He could, therefore, not blame anyone else if something was not to his liking. The rule for the adventure I proposed was that we would drive for a couple of hours to a site Ken would choose for a one or a two-hour visit or an overnight stay. This meant that we would see a mid- to late-morning location and another one in mid- to late-afternoon. Our lunch-stop would be determined by how long we stayed to view the midmorning and afternoon sights. This mealtime might or might not include an opportunity for sightseeing. We would stop early enough in the day to find a motel where we could remain overnight. There was no demand that we sleep in a place where there were things to see; swimming in a motel pool would be sufficient for them while I relaxed with a drink nearby.
Ken was presented with a Mobil Travel Guidebook for his scheduling endeavors. My guidelines worked! He did find interesting places none of us complained about, even if we never did locate the meteor crater near Odessa or any dinosaur-fossils, although the pump in one oilfield, from a distance, did resemble a medium-size, feeding dinosaur. On the other hand, given some other unexpected events, this was probably an advantageous omission.
Our first stop was for a foggy photo-opportunity at Washington-on-the-Brazos, the place where the Republic of Texas took form in 1836. Then on to San Antonio, with its Mexican mission buildings and River Walk. Although we investigated the real Alamo, our itinerary called for us to head west to Alamo Village near Del Rio. This tourist trap was the location for many western films, especially ones in which John Wayne had starred. The fake ruins were great for staging gunfights and for us to gain an appreciation for what the “real Texas” had been like. The boys even had the chance to be photographed with a stagecoach and badmen.
We then drove north to return to Interstate 10 and the true-western towns of Fort Stockton and Balmorhea, where we could swim in the spring-fed pool found in the local, state park. The water, not overly warm, was more green than the blue found in chlorinated motel-pools. The boys seemed to enjoy it with only minor objections. I, myself, did not like the feel of the scuzzy bottom.
El Paso and its mountain, along with the obligatory tramway-gondola ride, were the sights for our next adventure, which really occurred when we walked across the bridge to Ciudad Juarez, having paid our two-cent crossing fee. Back then, the journey did not require a passport for reentrance to the states. We found Mexican food was not all that different from what we had eaten in the Galleria in Houston. But the atmosphere was magnificent, even if somewhat dustier than what we had observed in San Antonio’s markets.
We left El Paso and made our way north, to the Carlsbad Caverns. This may have been the highlight of the trip. Although we had visited caves in parts of Texas and in Appalachia, nothing quite compared with those caverns of New Mexico. We hiked through its natural entrance, thankful that, in daylight, most of the bats had left the open cave. Finally, we arrived in the Big Room and witnessed the giant stalactites, stalagmites and fluted columns nature had formed over thousands of years. I wondered if, by placing my hand between the tips of those pyramids hanging down and those rising up, I could momentarily halt the earth’s evolution. None of us tried; we obeyed the guides’ instructions not to touch any of the living parts of the caverns.
Having passed through fairylands, castles and cathedrals glistening under a spectrum of artificial lighting, we had the chance to stand in absolute darkness and witness the diffuse colors washing through our retinas without external stimulation. At last, we rested in the subterranean cafeteria where we slowly consumed well-preserved, fossilized deli sandwiches, before squeezing into the upward-bound elevator and returning to the visitors’ center on the dry ground of New Mexico.
We continued our drive to the northeast and re-entered Texas. We beheld an environment that reversed what we had contemplated underground. We were now bewitched by the sky, by the blue dome of West Texas, with its strange, flat-bottom clouds looming into the atmosphere. Their cottoness captured every drop of available moisture and released none of it back to the parched earth, on which wind-devils and tumbleweeds danced as we crossed the flat plains crawling toward a distant, unapproachable horizon.
I am now unable to recall what other places we encountered in West Texas and the Panhandle. I don’t think we went as far north as Amarillo. We endured the flatness around Midlands and Odessa before making our way toward San Angelo and a stop in its newly created Holiday-dome. We returned to Houston at a pace much faster than Ken’s original itinerary had suggested.
While making our way through the last stages of our exploration of the caverns, I had begun to feel ill. I experienced an upset stomach, perhaps due to what I had eaten in Ciudad Juarez the day before. Within the next twenty-four hours my abdominal pains had not been relieved. I thought we probably should return home as soon as possible. We made the long drive from San Angelo to Houston with merely a stop or two for food for the boys.
The day following our return from our West Texas adventure, I went to work, as usual, in my office in the Fondren Building of The Methodist Hospital, in which the BCM Department of Medicine was located. Fortunately, the chief of the Gastroenterology division within the Department was in his office, around the corner from mine. Since my eyeballs and skin had taken on a very jaundiced tint, I thought I probably should get an informal consultation from him. With one glance at my yellow appearance, he gave me several immediate instructions: “Call your wife and have her pack a bag for you. Get in a wheelchair for a ride to Admissions at Methodist. You’re going to have your gall bladder removed as soon as possible.”
I returned home ten days later.