Work Life

Read Part I here

Read Part II here

On Day Three we got down to business, driving around looking at neighborhoods, apartment complexes and libraries.

I cannot overemphasize Luke’s reliance on public libraries to feed his insatiable appetite for knowledge. He checks out stacks of books at a time, almost all non-fiction, almost all on political or historical topics. Access to a good library is fundamentally necessary to his happiness and quality of life. Unfortunately, the little neighborhood libraries in San Antonio are geared more toward families and young children. None of them met the needs of our young revolutionary.

Our search for the right neighborhood was no more successful than Luke’s search for the right library. We found a few pretty ones, but nothing really clicked for us.

We did check out a local H-E-B, which is where virtually everyone in San Antonio gets their groceries, and we had a small, childish laugh when we discovered what H-E-B stands for.

We had contacted some apartment complexes in advance and arranged for viewings. One of these was up on the far north side, which we had not yet visited. Driving into this part of the city on Loop 410 was a surreal experience. The farther north we drove, the more San Antonio’s unique Hispanic flavor was replaced by ubiquitous chain stores and restaurants: Target, Walmart, Home Depot, Red Lobster, Olive Garden, Pappadeaux. It looked like North Richland Hills. Add some mountains and palm trees and it could have been Temecula. As we left the freeway loop and continued north on surface streets, it became more and more clear that a completely different culture presides up there. Before our trip someone told me that “living outside of 410 is like living in a real-life Truman Show,” and now I know what they meant.

And here I have to grudgingly admit, not without a certain small amount of self-loathing, that this part of the city falls more into our comfort zone than the colorful southern parts do. It checks all of the boxes: easy access to wild green spaces and hiking areas, sunny yards for a kitchen garden, boarding stables for Mahogany. This is most likely where we will end up, or at least start out.

When we got to the apartments that we had arranged to look at in this area, the office manager was out. We walked around on our own to get a feel of the place and realized fairly quickly that it wasn’t what we were looking for. The complex was built onto a hillside, and the driveways and parking spaces were so steep they looked like a transmission/parking brake endurance challenge. The location itself was uninspiring as well.

As we walked back to our car, the manager passed nearby in his golf cart on his way back to the office. He stared at us like he thought we were tweaker transients looking for scrap metal to pilfer.

We figured we might as well go in and talk to him since he was supposedly expecting us, so we changed course and headed to the office. I told him that I had spoken to someone on the phone about looking at the apartments.

Maybe he really did think we were transients or something, because he treated us as if we were wasting his time. He launched condescendingly into a list of requirements – income verification, criminal background check, rental history and so on – as if each one were a “gotcha” that would obviously disqualify us. By the time he realized that we were actual potential customers and adjusted his tone accordingly, we had lost all interest in doing business with him.

Those apartments weren’t right for us anyway, but the experience felt like a bad omen. For whatever reason, our appearance apparently wasn’t up to the local standards. What’s even the point of moving if we’re just going to end up in the same kind of conformist gatekeeping nonsense that makes DFW so visually appealing but culturally uninteresting?

The only other place that we had wanted to visit on the far north side was the “highest elevation point in San Antonio.” That turned out to be kind of a letdown too. The highest point in San Antonio is a restaurant parking lot that isn’t very high.

We chilled there for a while and talked about our impressions of San Antonio. The one thing we know for sure is that DFW isn’t where we want to be. It absolutely has its good points, but it’s a slow death of the soul for people like us. Here’s an example: in the four and a half years that I have lived in the Metroplex, I have not managed to have a single meaningful, get-to-know-each-other conversation with anyone there, and it hasn’t been for lack of trying. They are mostly a polite, pleasant people who are happy to chat about the weather and other superficial topics. I’ve had fun conversations, clever conversations, informative conversations. But whenever I try to bring up any deeper philosophical topics, they either laugh uncomfortably and change the subject, wander off, or tell me straight up that they cannot understand what I’m talking about. I’ve begun to suspect that there is actually no deeper level in their minds at all, even though that goes against everything I believe about the human soul. And yes, I realize how douchey and Iamverysmart I sound right now, but this is a profoundly alienating environment for us. Like, if it turned out that the entire population of DFW were actually androids like in The Stepford Wives or The World’s End, I would just be like, “Well, that explains it then.”

Anyway. Luke said that the absence of good libraries in San Antonio was a dealbreaker. I said that he just needs to give up on the little local branches and start looking at college libraries. We weren’t too far from UTSA at that point, so we drove over to look at its Peace Library.

Luck was just not with us that day. The library closed at 6pm, and we reached its door at 6:04. Still, the idea of having access to college and university libraries satisfied Luke. We agreed to give San Antonio a shot, and if it doesn’t turn out to be the right place for us, well, there’s a whole wide world out there just waiting to be explored.

When we were planning last year’s road trip to Austin, someone told me that we should definitely check out Enchanted Rock. We didn’t make it that time, but we did add it to the list of stuff we eventually wanted to do. So for this trip our plan was to leave San Antonio on the afternoon of the third day, spend the night at a campsite at the Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, and spend as much of the fourth day climbing around and exploring as we felt like before heading home.

This should have been completely doable. I had submitted my vacation request about a month in advance, after clearing the dates with my supervisor. My request sat in the system, unadressed, until three days before we had planned to leave. It was declined.

I had mentioned this road trip to various managers over the course of the month and no one had given me any indication that it would be a problem. I have a new supervisor now than the one that I had originally cleared the vacation with, but still. I had requested less than half of the vacation time I had accrued – four days out of the week-and-a-half I could have asked for – and somehow that was too much.

Anyway, long story short, I spoke to my new supervisor and got my four days of vacation, but not the same four days that I had requested. So even if I had rolled the dice and reserved a campsite at Enchanted Rock far enough in advance, it wouldn’t have done any good because we ended up not being there on the night we thought we would.

We ended up just playing the whole thing by ear. When the sun set on the third day we were sitting near a fountain in a courtyard at UTSA, still discussing our life goals. Our tent was in the trunk, and we still wanted to see Enchanted Rock, so I called a KOA near Fredericksburg and tried to reserve a campsite. They were booked full for Spring Break, but they recommended a nearby park that offered no-frills tent camping. I called there and was able to secure a spot.

It was an hour’s drive to the Lady Bird Johnson Municipal Park. When I checked in the receptionist asked if we were going to Enchanted Rock. I said we were, and she advised me to get there as early as possible, since she had heard that the lines were already really long by 7:30am. If I had known how useful that bit of advice would turn out to be, I might have hugged her right there. For real, she saved our whole day.

Camping tech has come a long way since my childhood days of heavy canvas tents and dim kerosene lanterns. We just bought a basic 4-person Coleman Sundome for this trip, but I love it. The most challenging part of putting it up was the brisk wind that kept trying to blow everything away. Once we got it assembled and staked down, the wind was a non-issue.

Lighting tech is on a whole new level these days. Our little $10 LED lantern was almost too bright on its brightest setting. The half-brightness setting was easier on the eyes and still lit up the whole interior when we hung it from the handy loop in the center of the tent.

The lantern really proved its value when it turned out that these primitive tent sites had no access to electricity. It runs off of a lithium battery that lasts forever, recharges via USB and doubles as a portable charger. So it provided plenty of light for setting up the tent and eating the supper we’d packed, recharged my camera’s battery while we slept, and then (partially) recharged itself on the half-hour drive to Enchanted Rock the next morning.

But that’s a story for the next post.

Read Part IV here