By Bart Barry
To hike South Texas in the summertime one must rise unconscionably early on a Saturday morning and be at the nearest state park when it opens and even then a line of early risers crowds the entrance not to hike but barbecue with familiars which might be the nuttiest thing I’d imagined till I saw it done – dozens of men hunched over open flames beneath a roasting sun while enveloped by air humid enough to sag oak branches. The same parks are vacant in the fall and winter when it is livable outside and all is much prettier because, evidently, cooking while cooking is a Lone Star State event more social than communal; one communes with fellow Texans outside in the heat more’n nature and if there is an appeal to all this it escapes me deftly.
Guadalupe River State Park is the one closest to downtown San Antonio and so I was there early last week to saunter more than hike a few miles to an overlook whose trail abandons the sand and desert of its larger part for a short bit through a primary campground. There are sundry overlooks of the shallow green river and its kayaks, bathers and splashers but few of them are isolated as I like and so what parking and hiking precedes the overlook compose the most part of a personal exercise regimen best called “light” in the summertime but part of an epiphany like this: The elimination of anxiety is nearer a theory of contentment as most may come and some weekly hours alone in nature subvert anxiety disproportionately better than more obviously pleasurable endeavors or their pursuit.
The grills were aflame all round the campgrounds on my traipse homewards and Texans are customarily polite people so I waded among the tables doffing my Wallaroo at anyone whose eyes I met. A number of students discussed a big test or the like and they were adorable deriving as they did so much nervousness and attendant anticipation from something so trite it brought to mind an honest friend who once told me she continued pursuing advanced degrees into her thirties because “It’s something I’m good at” – without deducing you can be good at most anything you pay $100,000 to do. A different group considered the legal troubles of their son or nephew or neighbor and as I’d attended a local-artist lecture a few evenings before I participated thusly:
“There’s a wonderful Mexican artist, or she was born here in Texas but raised in Mexico, her name is Jimena Marin, and apropos of her abstract early pieces she told us a bit of advice from her grandmother or aunt and it went, like, I think, we’re all born with a monkey, or, well anyway, a metaphor for problems, and some of us like to collect others’ monkeys and some of us like to give our monkeys away and some of us, I suppose (and by now I was improvising), nurture our own monkeys and watch them grow, and others of us neglect our monkeys and they shrink.”
It was an idea that was not tidying itself up as it did Thursday night for Ms. Marin and in a panic I decided to see if anyone wouldn’t forgive my changing the subject midway and proclaimed: “The Olympics, though, man!” A few other tables joined and soon we turned our spot near Rio Guadalupe to Rio de Janeiro. Someone held forth on the physics of women’s gymnastics and while it was absurd in its way to watch a man so large speak so confidently about the acrobatics of tiny teenage girls it was also interesting – the same way our other quadrennial obsession, figure skating, is interesting for the week it is interesting.
There was talk about Usain Bolt and his breaking or tying records only PED users before him set and I smiled and nodded along not because I believe any of it but because I’m not a sourpuss. And there was that swimmer, too, who faked his own hold-up in a gas station, the guy with the white hair, and I said “Michael Phelps?” partially to jog the others’ collective recall (it wasn’t Phelps, they’d know instantly, and how many other Olympic swimmers can a randomly sampled group of Americans name?) and mostly to keep momentum going in what by then was a premeditated direction.
Friday’s piece by Norm Frauenheim was excellent, of course, and as Norm knows more about the summer Olympics than the aggregate of our tables and our tables’ friends and families, I looked for a chance to insert in our campground chinwag Norm’s longheld theory about the robbery of Roy Jones and what it did to our sport in the decades that followed – best posed as a question like: How different might things have been if the world’s best fighter for a decade did not refuse to leave the country for fear of being robbed a second time?
“How about Olympic boxing?” I said, and I looked round the tables eagerly.
Four beats of silence got broken by the women’s gymnastics physicist saying he would check on the meat.
“Is that on television?” his wife said, sympathetically.
“The Brazilian men’s volleyball team plays the Italians tomorrow!” said a little girl.
“Is curling in the summer Olympics or winter?” asked her brother.
“Winter,” I said. “Did anyone see The Onion gave Kevin Durant the gold medal in Men’s Individual Basketball?”
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
