Texas, revisited

In June, when I was tubing in Texas, I met some new people that were fun to be around. In the olden days, they would have been filed away in my memory bank only to be withdrawn with a smile and an “Oh yeah,” at some later date far in the future. I am the low-key Kool-Aid man of memories.

The future is here and the olden days are toast. Facebook and blogs have kept me in touch with these fun people. They knew I was moving. I knew they were waterskiing. We shared surface details, the kind that gets bandied about on the Internet, which led to an exchange. Now just about a month after our first meeting, these new people were quite gracious to me when I visited their area.

I was in a conference center on a work trip clear across town from these Texans. Still, they came and picked me up from this island of a conference center, perhaps not fully realizing how far they had to go. They whisked me away to Fort Worth.

Our first stop was a water park. This wasn’t a slides-and-wave-pool kind of place, but a sit-and-think park with water as its central design theme. It was neat and modern and somewhat unexpected in a hot Texas town. It was quite visually interesting. Each section had a sort of theme- one was set below street level in a dimly lit recess with a long shallow well-lit pool of still water. The walls had a light coating of falling water and were lined with trees. There was space to sit and to relax in this quiet area. Another section had 40 fountains all spraying like oversized sprinkler heads and creating what the sign called “a single plane.”

The most interesting section to me was shaped like the inside of an upside-down pyramid, ice cream cone-like, without the rounded edges. Water was cascading down the sides and there were unevenly spaced and shaped rectangle steps spiraling down to a pool below. When I stopped to look up after taking a few steps down, it looked a bit like I was in a waterfall or some rapids but no water was splashing on me. I went further down, trying hard not to slip and fall, and then made my way back up again.

From the park, we made our way to the Fort Worth I had expected. The shops were closed, but even window shopping I could see a vast array of boots and cowboy hats in the stockyard section of town. I can imagine the thrill of the rodeo and still taste lamb fries.