Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

My daughter decided that since Monday was a holiday, we ought to get out of the house and go … go do something. We have always loved Fredericksburg and the Texas Hill Country, and the new Nissan (now nicknamed ‘Thing’ because of three letters making up part of the newly-issued license-plate) gets incredibly good mileage … so, we thought we would. Zip up the 281 to Johnson City and over the 290 ‘Wine Road’ to Fredericksburg. Alas, since it was Labor Day, the Ranger Museum and Fort Martin Scott were closed, and so was the Dutchmans’ Market, immediately opposite was likewise closed … so we went straight into town and parked in the lot behind the Visitor Center. That public parking lot is almost always and at best three-quarters empty. Perhaps most casual visitors to Fredericksburg don’t know about that parking lot, tucked away across the street from the Museum of the Pacific War…

Anyway, Wee Jamie became distinctly bored and fractious, halfway between Johnson City and Fredericksburg, to the point where we had to pull into Wildseed Farm and take him out to let him decompress. It seems that not only has Wildseed Farm succumbed to the Wine Road mania and added a tasting room – but now they are going to charge, in season, to walk through the wildflower meadows. Which is another sad indicator of the turistification of the Hill Country … but business owners have to make a living, I know. At least one of the vineyards has built a whole castle keep alongside the road, fulfilling a prediction that I made early this century. (That the Hill Country would become the New Provance, seeing that there was already wine, olive oil, lavender, sheep and sheep’s milk cheeses … all we needed now was some castles and quaint hilltop towns.)

Oh, yes. Wine. Every mile or so along the road between Blanco/Johnson City and Fredericksburg there is another winery, varied with a couple of distilleries and an enterprise to brew mead. My daughter says that if you follow the Wine Road and stop in at every place for a single glass, you’d best get on the liver transplant list in Johnson City and have Live Flight waiting for you at Fredericksburg. A saleswoman in one of the shops on Main Street where we shared this, lamented that Fredericksburg used to be famous for peaches … now it was for wine. Many of the larger vineyards now have B&B cabins and spa-oriented hotel facilities available on the grounds, so I guess you can sample a lot of their wines and then crawl to a handy bedroom to sleep it off.

Le sigh deep. We rather liked Fredericksburg when it was a pleasant little German Hill Country town where they rolled up the sidewalks at 5 PM weekdays and there were only a few bars and restaurants open after that hour of the evening. The National Museum of the Pacific War was in the Nimitz Hotel complex, slopping over to a nearly-empty warehouse on Austin Street and a pole barn a couple of blocks away, Now, the very last normal business on Main Street, the 5 & Dime closed (the elderly owners of a 100-year old business wanted to retire, a clerk in another Main Street store told us) – and the Christmas shop on the corner of Main and Llano has now moved all the Christmas stuff to the side, and revamped as a fashion boutique. What used to be a gas station across from the Nimitz Hotel (which then became a coffee shop with an outdoor terrace under the old canopy) has been replaced by an ornate retail building with New Orleans-style metal balconies; but in line with the general late 19^th century look of Main Street. The Subway sandwich shop diagonally across is also replaced by a retail complex. The shops, galleries and boutiques have filled up Main Street and spilled into parallel streets one block either side, Austin and San Antonio Streets, which used to be mostly residential. An acquaintance at a book club meeting in Fredericksburg told us a couple of years ago that there were now more B&B beds downtown than there were regular residences. Another acquaintance at that same meeting told us that they carefully avoid the Main Street area on weekends…

There was a small special gallery display for children at the War Museum – and it was free of charge, so we checked it out with Wee Jamie. It focused on the home front, and the work of children who wound up helping on farms and ranches when their older brothers and sisters went to war. There was a display of necessary crops, and then one about the rationing system, and a mockup of a news stand with WWII-era magazines and newspapers on display. But the final third of the exhibit was (drumroll, please!) focused on a Japanese-American girl interned with her family because … reasons. Much was made of the unfairness of this, although my mother, who was 11 years old when Pearl Harbor happened, had a best friend who was Japanese-American, and interned with her family. Mom was old enough to overhear a lot, especially when the war news turned ugly in 1942, what with the fall of the Philippines, and Singapore. Mom was frankly relieved when her friend was interned – as they would then be safe from retaliatory mobs, since so much was reported even then about Japanese atrocities against military and civilians in the Far East, not to mention fears of Japanese invasion on the West coast. What would have been more relevant to a Texas audience would have been a mention of interned German and Italian-Americans in Crystal city … or even American families with their children interned in camps at Los Banos and Santo Tomas in the Philippines under conditions of great hardship and brutality. This is, after all, a museum of the Pacific War.

We did visit the bookstore and gift shop – where my daughter bought a small flyer’s helmet for Wee Jamie, which has inspired me to make him a little flight suit and faux-leather aircrew jacket for his Halloween costume this year. Pictures of Wee Jamie will be posted when the outfit is finished. For the rest of the afternoon, we strolled up one side of Main Street to Town Square, and down the other. There weren’t an awful lot of people in town, and the heat was not too awful – so it turned out to be a very pleasant way to spend a holiday.