Birds of Bad Omen

Tag: travel

  • Replacing the Alamo

    Every January, when leisure travelers are staying away and the convention business is slow, city workers drain the portion of the San Antonio River that snakes through downtown and dredge its mucky bottom. They usually find chairs from restaurants’ patios, pint glasses, wine glasses, and shot glasses, cell phones, jackets — everything you’d expect to fall into the river from the limestone paths of the River Walk. But last year they found the Alamo on the riverbed near the Navarro Street bridge. It was covered in layers of thick, grayish-brown mud. Judging from the shape, the workers thought it was maybe a Volkswagen Beetle. But as they began washing off the mud with sprayers, they pretty quickly realized it was the Alamo.

    The church had been stolen five months earlier. (The perpetrators left the Long Barracks and Low Barracks.) City and state officials held several emergency meetings and, to avoid the humiliation of losing the Alamo on their watch and lawmakers’ demands for their heads, decided they would replace it with a replica that had been built in the early aughts for a movie about the Battle of the Alamo. They covered up the gap where the Alamo had been with a large canvas tent, told the public they were giving it a thorough cleaning, and brought in the replica in the middle of the night. Visitors to the Alamo noticed the difference, though they didn’t realize it was a fake Alamo. The site’s customer experience scores increased markedly. Within a few weeks, the number of visits was up dramatically. The two most common remarks in surveys were that it looked exactly like the Alamo they’d seen in that movie and that it was somehow fresher than they’d expected. More importantly, the experience left them inexplicably happy, almost euphoric in some cases, the result of some particular combination of quarried Austin limestone, mortar, and craftsmanship that stirred something in them.

    But a problem came to the surface as the Alamo’s popularity surged. The Battle of the Alamo ended in an appalling defeat, with as many as 257 dead Texians and Tejanos, and many triumphant Mexicans. And it didn’t take a military expert to understand what an absurd strategic blunder its defenders had made. There was a yawning mismatch between the historical facts visitors were given during the tour and how the structure made them feel. The managers of the Alamo responded by putting more emphasis on the battle’s importance as a rallying cry for fighters later in the war for Texas independence. But when that failed to close the fact-experience divide, they changed the defeat to a victory that was biblical in scale.

    Eventually, the new history of the Battle of the Alamo triumphed through the power of repetition over the resistance of professional historians. And it turned out the Texas Board of Education was eager for a new version of the story.

    The discovery of the real Alamo in the San Antonio River was an unwelcome development. The same functionaries who decided to replace it with the replica now had to decide what to do with the original. Storing it at some secret, secure location was tempting, but were there any truly secret locations left these days? It seemed unlikely. So, they opted to pulverize the Alamo.

    After hosing off the mud, the city workers were given orders to cover the church with a tarp. At 2 a.m. on a Thursday, two days after discovering the Alamo, a crew of six descended to the riverbed, set up three powerful work lamps, and threw themselves on the structure with jackhammers and sledge hammers like it was prey.

  • What the Boatman Said

    Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Over the next 45 minutes it’ll be my pleasure to tell you the story of San Antonio and its world-famous River Walk.

    But first I need to go over a few rules. One, please keep your arms and legs inside the tour barge at all times. Two, please do not throw anything, like a candy wrapper or empty soda cup, into the river.

    Please follow my directions to the tee in the unlikely event of an emergency. And don’t gesture to or otherwise address anyone on the River Walk’s beautiful limestone walkways, especially groups of drunks, unless you want to know what getting hit with a fusillade of beer bottles feels like.

    And please don’t stare at or ask about my robe and hood.

    You also need to be aware that gravity is denser on the San Antonio River and so time is slower down here than it is on the River Walk. If you left any friends or loved ones up there, once you’re reunited with them, they will talk mournfully about the many long days they endured without you, and they will be that much older than you. While the new difference in your ages won’t be that much, only a few days, it will eat away at the foundation of your relationship. It has to do with the shock of becoming aware that time doesn’t insist on treating you and others the same, even those close to you.

    Finally, tipping is strongly, very strongly, encouraged.

    Now let’s get started.

  • Real Texans

    “There are things you’ll never understand about this state or about being a Texan,” Michael said.

    He was wrong, of course. I’d moved here from Michigan decades ago, and my carpetbagging made me as Texan as him. But I knew who he was talking about. He meant the kind whose seven-year-old cheeks and forehead were smeared with the blood of the first deer he killed on the family ranch as an old man with thick whiskey breath said some incantation in atrocious Latin as he swayed over the boy. This also probably happened to Michael: his mother sent him and his brother out to shoot doves, and she talked reverentially about her brothers going out to hunt and her father and his brothers before them, and about the dishes she would make out of the meat in the afternoon. But when the boys returned hours later sweaty and grimy, with dozens of doves stuffed in an ancient leather bag, they found her passed out drunk on the toilet. And at one time or other, when Michael was a prepubescent, his parents and aunts and uncles must have encouraged him, through a series of blinks, silences, glances, and small smiles, to touch his first cousin inappropriately. And the secrets he was so good at keeping — about the crimes that were the wellhead of the family fortune, about the rapes and drunken rages that left puddles of blood soaking into hard wood floors. I’d never heard a word about them even though I’d known Michael for 20 years, had spent weekends at his family ranch in South Texas. I guessed, too, that Michael had a handgun with a long silver barrel under the driver’s seat of his Range Rover, a sidearm too beautifully made to ever be fired.

    This I knew for a fact: like most Texans of his caste, he was sent out East for his schooling and then out West to start his career, and he came home to run things.

    But not to rule, as in the old days — and that’s what made Michael flush with anger, push his plate of gnocchi to the middle of the table, and accuse me of being unable to understand Texas or Texans.

    I’d delivered a message from the lieutenant governor, who like me had come from somewhere else and didn’t have a family to brag about. Ambition, debts of various kinds, and a desire to overcome brought us to Texas.

    “The lieutenant governor knows you’re still moving ahead with plans for the office tower even though as a friend he advised you that the market wasn’t quite right for the project, to maybe build it somewhere else. Since indirectness is your ancestral language, you must have gotten the message. Going ahead and bringing in more investors and signing design contracts means you’re being willful. So now the lieutenant governor wants to be very clear — you are a mandarin and it’s time to stop what you’re doing.”

    I can’t describe the joy I felt as he pushed away his plate.

  • On Inauguration Day

    Cristina is about to get on an airplane, and I’m worried. We’re being left alone with the airlines, which are untrustworthy. I’m afraid their planes are going to run out of fuel mid-flight because the pilots never have enough money for a full tank and it’s so easy to lose track when it’s always near empty. I’m afraid pilots will put off oil changes and that their planes’ engines will seize up after takeoff. I’m afraid engine warning signs will go off and the pilots will ignore them, and whatever problems they’re warning of will spread until the planes are on fire on the shoulders of runways and the passengers stand a few dozen yards away wrapped up in silvery blankets and looking dazed, and the pilots and co-pilots are a little to the side of the crowd looking sheepish and avoiding eye contact with the cops who are trying to find out what happened before the fire broke out. I’m afraid that planes will start landing at random times and random airports and the pilots will pretend those were always the times and places they were supposed to arrive at. I’m afraid airports are going to be like that truck stop in flat, muddy eastern Arkansas where Cristina went into the women’s restroom and listened from a stall as a woman with a tired voice said to her companion that they had to keep trying to suck off this truck driver because she had to get to Fayetteville. It was the meth – he couldn’t cum because there was no water left in his body. But she had to get to Fayetteville, so please. In this scenario, the airlines are the truck driver and some of us are the woman and others are her friend.