Huntsville, Texas

 

When I found a quarter along the road, the first of these travels, in the first half hour of the day’s ride, I took it as a sign that it was going to be a good day.  That, of course, goes without saying, as any day spent on the bike is a good day, but since there was an Aldi’s less than a mile away, my first in over a week, I hoped it portended that I was in for a big score.  

But no, there’d been an early morning garbage pickup and the dumpster was empty. I suffered a second disappointment when the McDonald’s across the street was a rare one that only offered drive-through.  I had a blog report to finish off and file, so had to resort to the WiFi at the nearby Walmart where I had some shopping to do—a half gallon of chocolate milk, a handful of ramen, a loaf of bread and a couple of bananas.  

And, I’m sorry to confess, my purchases included a bike tube.  It is almost an indictable offense for a cyclist to make a cycling purchase at Walmart, but since bike shops are virtually extinct except in large cities, I had no choice. I had suffered the second flat of the trip the day before. Both had been patches that had gone bad.  Both tires had six or seven or more patches, some I recognized as from Brasil over two years ago, so I opted to retire the tubes rather than to patch a patch. I still had a spare, but didn’t care for that to be my only one, as it’s very possible to start the day with two flats after pushing my bike through thorny terrain from my campsite.

There was a spot by the vending machines in an aisle to the side of the entrance where I could sit by an electrical outlet, so my turn of bad luck had been reversed along with the store having 700C presta valve tubes in stock.  My only complaint was having to walk the length of the gigantic store to a back restroom to fill my water bottles, as the one up front was being cleaned.

The highlight of the day, in addition to the end-of-the day Carnegie in Franklin, was finding a Wyoming license plate.  It is much more colorful than the bland black-and- white of Texas and is spanned by a background of the Tetons.  It’s the first of Wyoming I’ve found and easily the prize of this trip’s roadside scavenging.  It could have been a wallet I found a few days before, but all the money was gone, containing just a driver’s license and credit cards, which I dropped off at the next police station.

There was no direct route to Franklin from Belton, so I pieced together a series of county and secondary roads, one of which turned into a dirt road for ten miles or so, as I’ve suffered several times in these travels.  This was the least painful of such excursions.  It had a minimum of gravel and washboard, so it was a rather pleasant interlude with no traffic. I was relieved when it turned to pavement well before a bridge over the Brazos River.  If it had remained dirt, I feared the possibility that the bridge might be out and I’d have to make a huge detour to another bridge.

It was less than an hour before dark when I reached Franklin.  The library was closed and it’s WiFi needed a password, so I had to resort to the Dairy Queen next door for water and the internet. Dairy Queen’s are quite ubiquitous in Texas.  Many offer seating, as much or more than the more prominent fast food restaurants, as this one did.  It provided a fine view of the modest-sized Carnegie built in 1914 when frills were discouraged.  It was still a notable brick building with high arched windows and a pressed metal roof that resembled tiles.  It was on a slight rise on a narrow strip of land along a main highway coming into town giving it all the more stature and all the dignity as those with columns and other decorative features.

The Carnegie in Bryan, thirty-one miles south, built in 1903, was another of those early stunners.   It is the oldest still standing Carnegie in the state and is a rare one with a street-level entrance rather than the traditional promenade up a set of steps. A plaque out front credits the efforts of the Mutual Improvement Club, renamed the Women’s Club in 1909,  for having the inspiration of acquiring the library, one of just thirty-one cities in the state with Houston and Dallas having two each.  It would have suffered the fate of twenty other Carnegies in the state if the power-brokers and money-interests had had their way.  

When the new library was built a block away in the ‘70s the building had a succession of tenants, none of whom put anything into its maintenance.  As the building deteriorated, it had a period of several years when it was vacant.  Those who wished to tear it down were happy to see that becoming imminent, salivating at the opportunity to build something new and nondescript on its choice downtown lot across from the local movie theater.   

But a handful of devotees of the library, who had a not-so-common for Texas preservationist rather than development mindset, managed to get it turned into the research and genealogical branch of the library.  It’s interior is as soul-elevating as its exterior and includes two portraits of Carnegie, one the standard and a second painted by a local.  When Janina and I passed through Bryan in 2014 it was a Sunday, so we didn’t have the opportunity of gaining entry. I was happy it was on my way to the next  Carnegie in Alexandria, Louisiana, nearly three hundred miles away, allowing me to get to know it a little better.

It was Election Day in Texas.  The polling places were all obvious from a couple of blocks away by the forest of signs out front, some with human easels.