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Show RIVER the skeet range he and his wealthy friends built in the meadow below the peak and he let Tex live in the cabin up on top. Tex named the peak Lonestar, carved steps in the sandstone leading up to the cabin, and made the place truly his own, as only a propertyless man can. On a jutting rock near his shack he carved the words "Lonestar Peak" and his own initials, "FHZ." I never met Tex, but I became intimately acquainted with his legend. Although he claimed connection with a phenomenally wealthy Texas oil family, Tex had spent his first forty years drifting, being a cowhand, hobo, gambler, and private detective during his checkered career. He wrote mysteries, westerns, and soft-core porn under the pen name "Astor Royale," though I don't believe he was ever published and nobody I met who'd ever read any of Tex's stuff had a good word to say about it. He was a vegetarian and a star-gazer: he'd wander Bonny Doon shouldering a towsack filled with the plunder of vineyards, orchards, and gardens, and he'd built a telescope out of tin cans with a hand-ground lens he claimed was a miracle of exactness. One of Tex's last drinking buddies, M.C. Moquin, lived in a ranch house near the foot of the mountain. He climbed the up the peak one evening and introduced himself. Moquin, a retired San Francisco private eye who looked a lot like an aging Peter Sellers, was a man of few words. "So you knew Tex?" I said. "Yep," he said. "What was he like?" "Tex," he told me with a very straight face, "was the original hippie." Lonestar Peak was surrounded by a variety of bizarre geological phenomenon, such as an enormous, perfectly round boulder split exactly in two -121- |