Some Ghosts Smell Like Dill: Grandpa And The Rivers His Spirit Haunts (Father's Day W/O)
Written: Jun 16 '01 (Updated Aug 20 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Floating down a Hill Country river remains almost as perfect as I remember
Cons: Civilization and commercial development continue to advance and intrude like a weed
The Bottom Line: The Texas Hill Country is the spiritual home of my family, and, for me, family vacations there are more akin to a religious pilgrimage than to a weekend trip.
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| AggieBrett's Full Review: Texas Hill Country |
The rivers of the Texas Hill Country haunt me.
They haunt me with the sounds of a man I barely had a chance to truly know, and by the scents of days I can never forget. When I'm on a Hill Country river, the memories flow as thick and fast as do the waters, because Grandpa haunts these hills.
Louis Joseph Kunz-- "Grandpa"-- died July 5, 1988. The official cause of death is best described as "cerebral hemorrhage," but using that pile of expensive words merely shifts the blame from the true culprit-- a laughably small puddle on a rock on a Hill Country riverbank.
For some people, summer means trips to the beach. For other families, summer means a camping trip to the mountains, fleeing from the heat. For some clans, summer means a trip to DisneyWorld or some other theme park. For as long as I can recall in my family, summer has meant The River.
Of course, "The River" doesn't really refer to any one river, but to any of several rivers in that region of central Texas known as The Hill Country. The Guadalupe, the Blanco, the Frio, the Medina, and the San Marcos Rivers all have their devotees, and I've splashed and floated in each of them over the years, but Grandpa always loved the tiny Comal River in New Braunfels, Texas.
Every year, he'd rent a huge screened cabin on a hill overlooking a bend in the Comal. As the tradition developed, "the family"-- basically anyone that wanted to show up, whether they were truly related or not-- would congregate in New Braunfels for an innertubing vacation sometime during the week bracketed by the weekends on either side of July 4.
The same cabin would always be rented for that ten days and a slow parade of people would pass through during that time. Cousins and uncles and grandkids and in-laws and friends and neighbors would pretty much just come and go as they pleased, staying for a night or three, only to be replaced with another group of relatives. Everyone would bring food and drink, and everyone would be free to eat and drink whatever was in the cabin.
By day we'd float down the clear blue-green Comal under the shade of cypress and oaks, bounce along some gentle rapids, body surf in the shallow white water, one foot tucked under a rock to brace against the current, dive in the cool deeper "swimmin holes", and just hang out, together, doing nothing much in particular and enjoying every deceptively empty moment. By night we'd find some place in the cabin where there was room to bed down-- sometimes in a bed, sometimes in a cot, sometimes on the sofa, sometimes on the floor, maybe in a hammock out on the porch overlooking the river, but always with the gentle roaring hum of several box fans perched on windowsills lulling us to sleep.
On the afternoon of July 4, 1988, Grandpa had been tubing for a few hours and decided he'd take a break to rest a bit and enjoy a cold beer in the shade of the porch. As he started up the long rock stairpath away from the river, he stepped in a small wet spot, slipped on a dark slick patch of algae growing there, flipped backwards and cracked his skull on a rock as he tumbled down the hill. He would never regain consciousness-- he died in a hospital in San Antonio that next afternoon likely having never fully understood that the accident had even happened.
That particular year I was supposed to meet the rest of my family at the river a few days after the Fourth-- I was on break from college and had some work to do back in Houston, plus some friends were in town over summer break and we were going to have a get together of our own, so I'd not headed that way with the rest of my family. But then the phone rang early on the evening of the Fourth and my younger sister explained "Grandpa's been hurt bad-- you better get here as soon as you can." I jumped in my car and blasted towards San Antonio at somewhere around 100 MPH. I arrived in San Antonio just at the end of visiting hours, and all I managed was a glimpse of him through the door windows of the ICU. He seemed far too pale-- a strange waxy gray hue-- and had bandages all over his head and all sorts of tubes and wires connecting him to at least a half dozen machines. It was hard to accept that the inanimate shape was Grandpa.
We all drove back to the cabin in New Braunfels and just sat there, numb, not sure what to think or feel or expect. When we arrived back at the hospital shortly after dawn the next morning, we were met in the ICU by my grandmother who said simply "he's gone."
The rest of my family wandered to his bedside to view his lifeless body, but I declined. Some of my family didn't understand why I'd turn down that one last glimpse, but that was just one memory of Grandpa that I didn't want in my mind. Instead I drove back to the cabin alone, cracked open a beer, grabbed an inner tube, and spent the rest of the day floating on the Comal. I laughed that Grandpa probably would have appreciated the practicality of my decision-- "dammit, that cabin is paid for!" he was likely barking from the afterlife. I floated in my innertube and stared at the silvery blue sky and wondered what to feel, when finally I decided that what I would feel-- what I deeply wanted and needed to feel-- was joy. To the end, Grandpa had lived a simple and happy life, and he'd left the stage having felt no pain and having brought no extended suffering to any of the people who cared about him. On his last day, he was surrounded by his friends and family, and he was exactly where he wanted to be doing exactly what he most enjoyed doing.
My own earliest conscious memory involves both Grandpa and the Comal: I'm three years old and Grandpa is holding me as we both wade into the waters of the river. I can taste my terror-- to me that river seems like a giant boiling thing that will swallow me down and carry me away-- but Grandpa just chuckles and says "it's alright... it's alright..." as he pats me on the back and carries me into the water. He points out the way that the small fish hide in the shadows next to the bank. The way the river has worn all the rocks smooth. The way the tubers passing by each will lock their feet under the arms of the person in front of them, forming "a train" to go down the rapids together. After a moment, I'm laughing and splashing, and I can recall Grandpa dunking me beneath the waves so that we could grin at each other underwater.
Now that I have a wife and family of my own, trips to The River remain as much a part of our typical Summer as they did for me as a child. Of course, for me, one of the attractions is that strange time warp rush of sense memories of Grandpa that hits like a wall of foaming water whenever I'm on The River.
As I stand in a Hill Country BBQ joint, picking up lunch for our family and friends, I can close my eyes and suddenly I smell the sawdust on the floor of a German dancehall while an accordion player leads the band in another polka and dozens of gray haired women with twinkling eyes and square jaws set out platter after platter of homemade sausage and cabbage and yeast rolls, and I'm five years old and standing in my sock feet on top of Grandpa's shoes as he laughs and leads me around the dancefloor at a family reunion in some flyspeck Czech farming village near Austin....
As I put away clothes in our cabin I find myself genuinely surprised that it doesn't smell like a closet should-- hinting of Old Spice and mothballs and glove leather and gun oil like the big closet in Grandpa's bedroom where I'd go to grab a blanket when I was cuddling on his sofa, watching "The Carol Burnett Show" and laughing that he was laughing so hard....
As I pull my ball glove from my dufflebag and stand in the dry prickly clump grass of a riverside clearing, slapping my fist into the oily dark pocket worn smooth by the impact of ten thousand ground balls, somewhere in the corner of my mind I swear I can smell sprigs of dill drying in a dusty garage, and I can hear the "tuggatuggatugga" of an old Sears garden tiller chugging away in the vegetable garden....
As I sit on the sofa in the Cabin with both of my boys on my lap and we play a laughably useless game of checkers in which we are all cheating and making up silly rules on the fly, I can close my eyes for a moment and suddenly the A/C humming in the window becomes the sound of a box fan and and I'm sure that I could still smell the cherry sweet odor of pipe tobacco gently wafting around the room....
As I fix sandwiches the next afternoon to take down to the river where my wife and kids lounge on the boulders, I open one of the old cabinets and discover that familiar musty "cabin smell" and suddenly from somewhere almost forgotten I'm hit with the smell of green pecan husks and fresh picked okra and room temperature cheddar and cold beer and cucumbers and gasoline and newly mown grass and old vinyl upholstery and countless other smells that will always be be part of my memory of Grandpa.
Last year I took my wife and kids on vacation to swim in the Blanco River in Wimberley, Texas (about 30 miles from New Braunfels). As I step from our van and fumble for the key to our cabin, I'm hit with long familiar warm dusty notes of limestone and scrub cedar and cypress trees and river water and suddenly I am somewhere else, long ago. I half expect to open the door and see Grandpa sitting there on the porch overlooking the river, a blue halo of pipe smoke swirling lazily around him, an Astros game on the transistor radio and a sweating bottle of Pearl beer on the table in front of him. I stand there grinning absently for a moment, happily absorbed in my flickering flashback, until my oldest son taps me on the hip.
"Open the door, daddy. I want to put on my shorts and go to the river!"
I unlock the door and the six year old boy rushes past me and through the cabin to open the curtains of the sliding door that opens to the patio overlooking the river. "Hey, goof," I ask the bouncing six-year old. "Do you know who you are named after?"
"Yes," he offers with a proud grin. "Joseph was your grandpa's name."
I turn on the window unit air conditioner and smile as that familiar hum sends me back in time once again. As my wife helps our boys change into their shorts and river shoes, I pull a beer from the cooler and step outside. Everything feels just like it did on any of a thousand perfect summer days from my own childhood, and I suddenly wish Grandpa could be there with me to see my boys-- to see that some of the old rites and rituals are remembered. The mesquite trees rustle with a slight breeze that carries smells of hamburgers on a grill from another cabin somewhere nearby, then the breeze passes, leaving only the buzzing of cicadas to break the silence. A few moments later my boys burst from the cabin and run squealing down the grass and gravel trail to the river, towels streaming behind like cotton contrails. In that still moment I swear I can hear the crackling play-by-play of a ballgame on a radio almost out of earshot, and suddenly I realize that Grandpa is right there, just like he always will be.
Sometimes it's nice to be haunted.
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This Epinion is part of the 2001 Father's Day Write-Off hosted by sumo_rhino. Scheduled participants include: AdaDavis, AggieBrett, AngelaBar, Arazim, dougsanders, GinaHill, Howard_Creech, JAMES23, JediKermit, jkkelley, JNGowan, kevlog, LDiablo, MadTheory, mike.holmes, mattjoe, Nathanael73, PSobel, scoobysnack00, Shalott, Sloucho, and sumo_rhino.
The write-off celebrates our dads, or, in this case, grandfathers. Participants have chosen topics for review that offer remembrance of their paternal relationships or bind them to their fathers in some way. For an uplifting experience, please visit the other contributions.
A complete list of participants/reviews and links is available at our web page:
http://www.gpaulray.com/writeoff
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Recommended:
Yes
Best Suited For: Families
Best Time to Travel Here: Jun - Aug
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Epinions.com ID:
AggieBrett
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Member: Brett
Location: Katy, Texas (suburb west of Houston)
Reviews written: 47
Trusted by: 119 members
About Me:
I like gravel.
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