OCR Text |
Show RIVER with a narrow passageway between the halves. In the highest and strangest places, Tex had patiently cut his initials into the rock. Yearly, a geology professor from San Francisco State brought his classes to look at the geologic oddities, and he told me stories about old Tex. "I used to bring Tex whiskey or orange juice," he reminisced. "But as time went on, Tex became much more interested in the whiskey than in the orange juice." Tex must have been something of a philosopher, because living atop that lonely rock for twenty-odd years must have required some philosophizing. Whenever the loneliness of the place made him restless, Tex hitchhiked to Las Vegas or Reno and played Keno. Folk tales related that Tex sometimes returned with a Cadillac full of blondes, but both the cars and the ladies soon went the way of all good things. Tex was supposed to have worked out a very elaborate Keno system. One story told that Tex once went to the casinos in the Bahamas, won $50,000, bought a yacht, wrecked it on the west coast of Mexico, and drifted back to Lonestar as broke as he had started out. He was supposed to have drunk a lot of whiskey, too. The stories about Tex's gambling and drinking were true, for when I moved in at the peak nearly ten years after he died the place was still littered with bundles of heavily annotated Keno cards and empty whiskey bottles. When I first saw the cabin it was in very poor shape, with the shake roof falling in, the windows broken, the entire structure sagging beneath much time and hard service. Many crazies had used and abused the cabin since Tex's demise, and it showed. In the spring before I moved in, a crowd of drunken young jocks from Felton had pushed what was left of the cabin off its foundations, ripped it up, -122- |