![]() ![]() ![]() Henry’s paraphrase, himself no stranger to the Frio country, “No child is a hero to her long-suffering saddle horse”). Of long pony rides on tree-shaded trails and over the Frio, where my horse-always my horse-lingered for what seemed an eternity, determined to drink the river dry and strand us from the rest of the train (to paraphrase O. Of seesaws and camp fires and ice-cream bars from the lodge store. I see the sign for Neal’s (“T-shirts, riverwear, inflatables, giftables”), and I’m awash in memories. Our lumbering white Tahoe reminds me of my family’s creaky caravan of Suburbans and fifth-wheel-pulling pickup trucks, and just like decades earlier, the winding two-lane roads seem to be in cahoots with the undulating landscape to heighten anticipation. So here we are, fortysomething years later, three friends and a baby, on our way to Neal’s, family-run since 1926 and still as delightfully no-frills as it was when I was a kid. We went to the coast and to Concan.” That’s what we did, that’s where we went, and therefore, in the way that a certain place at a certain time will take powerful hold in the psyche, it became a place that requires an occasional return visit in order for me to feel fully myself. ![]() “Nowadays it seems there are so many more-exciting places to go,” my aunt Merle says, “but that’s just where we went. To me, this southernmost portion of the Edwards Plateau embodies what poet David Whyte calls a “conversation of elements that makes a place incarnate, fully itself.” Bisected by the meandering, crystal-clear Frio River, it’s a juxtaposition of green-carpeted hills, scrubby trees and yellow-flowered prickly pear, and everywhere rocks and limestone ledges and stony canyon walls. Not particularly remote, and a virgin wilderness by no means, the oddly named hamlet has nonetheless been my favorite little pocket of the state ever since. And nowhere do memories of tubing loom larger than Concan, where my extended family would converge at Neal’s Lodges when I was a kid. But nothing in the world compares to being whisked down the rock-riven channels of a beautiful Texas river. I’ll float anything from a glassy lake to a Jacuzzi tub (really, if it’s big enough). Or better yet, on the water, preferably borne by an inflatable inner tube. Anyone who knows me knows I’m happiest when I’m in the water. ![]()
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