…and other tales from two years living in rural Texas
I find that the most interesting stories almost always happen by accident – the tale of my two years living in rural Texas is no different. After a chaotic month in Junction, a dusty town on the cusp of west Texas, I was hit head-on by an old man driving an old pickup truck mere miles from the Mexican border. Desperate for a new car and stable work situation, I stumbled into a different job in a similarly small town of 2500 people, Hallettsville, tucked in the rolling hills of south-central Texas’s Czech country. I only found the job because of a fleeting connection I met in Junction, and I only accepted the job because there were few opportunities at the height of the pandemic. However, the next two years would unfold as some of the most surreal, simple, fascinating, and definitive times of my life.
I began my post staying at the Hotel Texas, a faux-rustic motel with limestone facades and wagon wheel furnishings on its wraparound porch. It was brutally hot in late July – I didn’t care as much about the kitschy Texas ambiance as that my room had a strong air conditioning unit. After working 10 or 12 hours in the day, much of it surveying our facility in 100-plus degree heat, I would slump on the bed and crack open a Shiner seasonal brew from my well-stocked mini-fridge. For the first month, this was my only taste of the culture – the sweet overtones of Strawberry Blonde, Peach Wheat, and Mango Kolsch, brewed at the Shiner brewery in the next town over, were my nightly cure for heat exhaustion and loneliness. I did not explore either town, simply stayed in my cool dark hotel room until morning, when I would grab a Texas-shaped waffle from the continental breakfast on my way to work.
Eventually, I did need to get acquainted with Hallettsville – when my month at the hotel was nearly up and I couldn’t find a place to live. The town is so small that there were no rental units listed online, and the only property with a visible “for rent” sign was restricted to senior citizens. My new coworker Jen, amused by my misadventure but eager to help, showed me that most business in Hallettsville is conducted via Facebook groups, and she quickly found me a small rental home in a central location. I met my new landlords, Donna and Mark Nevlud, the next day as they handed me the keys over a signed lease agreement. Setting up utilities was simple, a one-stop shop of co-ops managed by the city. Finding high-speed internet was harder…it’s not something most people use here. Without any recommendations, we eventually managed to find one provider who could run a new fiberoptic line into my unit for a solid 50 Mbps connection. I met my neighbors soon after moving in, and even in the distance of the pandemic, I felt welcomed by the warmth of interaction.
A little about my humble abode: it’s a converted garage, pictured above, with a washer and dryer in the lower story “man cave” and everything else in a miniature flat above. I say miniature because of the four main rooms – kitchen, dining nook, living room, and bedroom – the kitchen was largest at 10’ x 10’ (about 9 square meters). The bathroom was also compact, as I had to straddle the vanity to use the toilet and hop over the toilet to access the shower. Did I mention that the ceilings were only 7 feet upstairs and barely 6 feet downstairs? The door frames were scaled down accordingly, so I learned to duck at the bottom of the stairs or when entering my basement or closet. This dollhouse of a home was part of a makeshift apartment complex, behind the turn-of-the-century anchor house and its duplex addition, a small two-room cottage that was plopped in the side yard, and the stripped-down shell of a 100-year-old farmhouse that was propped up on cinderblocks opposite the driveway. This homemade hodgepodge of residential architecture is common around here, as it turns out, which gives Hallettsville a character that doesn’t exist in most rural or suburban areas.
After moving in, I finally wandered into Hallettsville’s central square, the nexus of commerce for most of Lavaca County, a town center that looks much as it did 50 or 100 years ago. Hovering over everything is the brownstone courthouse, a towering monument to the law and order that tamed the West and influences Texas culture to this day. A stone clocktower rises a couple stories higher, the hands on each clock face perpetually reading 5:13, like a snapshot of nostalgia in a Norman Rockwell painting. A number of other turn-of-the-century buildings remain around the square, many marked by the Czech names of their original proprietors. The 1893 store of A. Levytansky is now subdivided into the county headquarters for the Republican Party. The Victorian redbrick florist building is juxtaposed against the modern steel-and-glass People’s Bank (lined with an impressive collection of exotic taxidermy visible from the outside at night). Several other businesses remain in aging storefronts: Ehler’s furniture, Rainosek’s Hardware, Cole Theater, two barber shops and two salons, a boutique, several offices, a restaurant, an ice cream parlor, a bodega, and more. My favorite storefront belongs to a dusty computer repair shop, unironically crowned by the “The New Era” below the building date of 1923. Granite and iron hitching posts line the sidewalks, hearkening to a time when the parking spaces were occupied by horses and wagons instead of large pickup trucks and farm trailers.
The more time I spent in the square, the more I appreciated how special it was to have a very-much-alive downtown within a short walk from home. Despite scouring all the furniture stores within a 50-mile radius, my mom and I found the best furniture fits at Ehler’s – the sleek dining set and ladder bookshelf that ended up in my apartment were new additions to their constantly rotating inventory, and at a good price too. Anytime we needed odds and ends setting up the house, Rainosek’s usually had what we needed. If not, there was another hardware store, two auto parts stores, two lumberyards, and a Dollar General a few blocks away. I could get the freshest meat from Glen’s Meat Market, the freshest mangoes and avocados from Tienda San Miguel, and most other grocery items from Brookshire Brothers or Hoffer’s. For such a small town, Hallettsville was stocked – thanks to liberal subsidies from the city government. In the same vein as the MAPS program in Oklahoma City, the citizens had agreed upon a 1-cent sales tax to fund, among other public goods, a business development program through which local businesses can receive up to a $10,000 grant, provided that they spend all of that money at other Hallettsville businesses. The result was a climate where small businesses survive, even thrive, to the point that locals often don’t even consider making the 40-mile drive to Victoria to get a slightly better deal.
I had the special privilege of visiting City Hall early and often, giving me an exclusive look into the operation of small-town government. My company did not yet have the permits to build a large-scale hand sanitizer manufacturing operation on its property, and one of my first assignments was to “strong-arm the City” into allowing our construction to proceed. I arranged a meeting with the city administrator, chair of the chamber of commerce, fire marshal, and head of the permitting office, which took place in a drab conference room with folding tables set up in a large U-shape around a set of American and Texas flags. After we were given a warm welcome for setting up in their proud little town, the tide of the meeting turned rather quickly as the city representatives informed us that there are no exceptions to the permitting process. Rather, since the town is too small to have resident code experts, all permit reviews (except for the simplest things like residential outbuildings) are outsourced to Bureau Veritas, a private firm that specializes in all levels of code consulting. As no one in the room had undertaken a building project on our proposed scale, my company was sent away to assemble the team of requisite code experts ourselves. Every time I went back to City Hall, however, the staff was warm and helpful, appreciative that I was working closely with them even if red tape limited the extent to which they could help me.
As the summer days became more bearable in September, I settled into my new home and routine. Work from sunup to sundown, relax for a couple hours in the evening, and head out of town each weekend. One evening while sipping a cold Shiner on my balcony, I noticed a phenomenon at the vacant and dilapidated Ford dealership across the street: every night, shortly after sundown, a few hundred bats would emanate from the broken windows, make a beeline for the pecan trees in my yard, then disperse into the night. In a cacophony of echolocation clicks, the swarm of bats would feast on all the insects in the neighborhood as the frogs and other night sounds came alive. I caught COVID during this awkward time when many people were beginning to treat COVID as an unserious or even nonexistent condition while simultaneously shunning those who contracted COVID like biblical lepers. In my isolation, I would walk outside every evening, watching this nightly wildlife show against the glowing backdrop of a Sahara dust sunset before making my rounds on the empty streets of the town.
Upon my recovery, it wasn’t long before I had my first visitors! A group of friends who lived in Houston, working as nurses during the worst of the pandemic, passed through on the way back from a weekend in the hill country. I was excited to take them around the photogenic town square, culminating with some rolled ice cream from the adorable Flamingo Diner. Unfortunately, their visit coincided with one of the two times during the year that local farmers turn over their fields. The muggy air was heavy with the stench of manure, a nauseating smell that pervaded the whole town. The odor stuck to my clothing, hung in my nostrils, penetrated my pores. Our visit was rushed indoors, which stunk a little bit as well. I had to work to convince my friends that I didn’t live in a literal shithole, coughing, “It’s not usually like this here!” as they hurried back to their vehicle.
Fall sneaks up on you in Texas – it’s still hot like summer, but the days are shorter and there’s an occasional tropical depression that drops several inches of rain in one weekend. One place in town leans all the way into spooky season, though, and that’s the old Lavaca County jail. A foreboding stone edifice that looms over a vacant lot behind the square, the old jail was built in 1885 and held prisoners as recently as 2005 (crazy!). Inside, there are massive vault-style doors concealing several concrete cells upstairs, with no air conditioning, only windows fortified with wrought-iron bars. I only briefly peeked inside the former jail, getting a view of the cage-like holding cells along a sterile white guard hallway. If you’re particularly bold, there is an option to rent the building for events, mostly attracting experienced ghost hunters/paranormal investigators. For Halloween, the outside gets decked out with cobwebs and scarecrows for a family-friendly haunt with no mention of the real ghosts inside. That’s in addition to the year-round décor, a wall of pro-Trump banners and other Republican campaign signs that might frighten someone from San Francisco but is about as common as the American flag here.
The 2020 election was a huge deal here, though not for the reasons you might think. Since Republican victories were all but assured in the statewide races, county and city offices were the most hotly contested. The challengers for sheriff and judge ran on a joint platform to “end the tyranny” of masks and shutdowns, and I only caught wind of a raucous debate about the constitutionality of any COVID precautions a week before election day. The race for Hallettsville mayor was perhaps more intriguing, as challenger Gordon Clark stuck colorful flyers in every mailbox to detail his qualifications as a down-to-earth cattleman and thrifty small-business owner. I saved one of the flyers – an instant classic – my favorite line was one where he likened incumbent Alice Summers’s policies to “horse manure.” Mayor Summers prevailed in her election, as did the “end the tyranny” duo, which means that change candidates uniformly lost their races. It did bring me solace, however, that my little Texas town finally had a proper sheriff to protect it, I mean look at this guy!
High school football is king here in rural Texas. For a school district with only 80-100 kids per graduating class, Hallettsville High School is well-endowed with a brand-new astroturf field and 3000-seat stadium that would fill to capacity for Friday night home games. The Hallettsville Brahmas were the talk of the town as they dominated opponents en route to a runner-up finish in their 3A-1 state tournament in 2020. So the hype to play rival Shiner, who won their state championship in the next division down, was at an all-time high when I took in my first Brahmas game. Though I knew none of the players, the names were familiar – “Patek in the pocket, pass is…caught by Rainosek, quickly brought down by Janak just short of the first down.” About half the names I knew as prominent families in the area, either from the names of businesses or from my other interactions in town. Also during this game, I was dismayed to learn that Brahma is pronounced with a hard “a”, rhyming with Alabama…I am certain that I poshly mispronounced their mascot on several occasions yet never received a single “bless your heart,” at least not to my face.
To get away from the bright lights, I would often drive out of town on a nameless dirt road to gaze at the night sky. At my favorite spot a few miles outside of town, I would park on a grassy hilltop with a 360° view and throw a mattress pad on top of my car to lay on. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see the diffuse glow of Victoria, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio off toward the horizon, but directly above was a deep black sky littered with thousands or millions of stars. On a crisp night in November, I was laying out under a drafty quilt watching a meteor shower in full clarity when, suddenly, the sky behind me glowed bright yellow. A column of flames, tall and wide as a building, roared up from the flare of the oil well a hundred yards away, blazing with the hungry whoosh of an old steam engine and radiating an ominous warmth that I could feel in my face and chest. I was transfixed, watching in awe as the massive fire burned for several minutes, an unsupervised bonfire of thousands of liters of high-pressure natural gas released (somewhat paradoxically, at least to me in that moment) to preserve the safe operation of the well.
The oil and gas industries, while integral to the economy and culture of Texas, inspire mixed feelings among the residents of Lavaca County. On one hand, rich crude oil deposits boosted the area to a level of affluence throughout most of the 20th century, as I read about in a featured book display at the local library. Many residents still receive small royalty checks from wells that operate to this day. However, a series of oil busts wiped out the high paying industrial jobs that many residents relied on, and the bulk of the drilling activity has migrated to the massive Eagle Ford shale formation that begins 20 miles to the west. Nowadays, cattle ranching is held to a much higher esteem, as cows outnumber people 3-to-1 in Lavaca County (in fact, Lavaca translates to “the cow” in Spanish). Brahmas may be the favorite mascot around Hallettsville, but the area is also known for other varieties such as Hereford, Angus, Longhorn, and Shorthorn (the mascot of the next town to the north, Schulenburg). Since my company took over the old Fair West Trailers building, I had many uncomfortable conversations as locals stopped by expecting us to service their cattle trailers. It was a personal affront to many of them that Fair West Trailers would go out of business, as the shop was central to the cattle raising culture around the community.
After the first frost in late autumn, a windy day blanketed my yard with hundreds of pecans. The windfall littered the streets of the town with a scree of raw nuts that crunched underfoot. I didn’t mind this at all, as after cracking the shell by rolling the nut with my shoe I would eagerly extract the edible flesh and savor the aromatic overtones, grazing as I walked. Capitalizing on the inconvenience of the hard shell, signs advertising shelling for $5 to $10 per pound sprang up in front of many homes and businesses. While I slowly peeled my ~10 pounds of pecans by hand over the next several months, I understood why mechanized shelling equipment was such a hot commodity. Unfortunately, pecan trees only bear fruit every 2 years, as I found out the following year when none of the trees in my yard, outside my work, or in the public park dropped any delicious nuts.
Hallettsville’s city park was an underrated gem. Situated around a 9-hole public golf course, the park contains several baseball and soccer fields, a public pool, sand volleyball courts, a covered basketball court, a wooded half-mile walking path, a garden club, and more playground equipment per capita than anywhere else I’ve been – again, the power of local tax revenue. The park was a refuge for me, as I was often the only person shooting hoops or walking the loop. Along the path are signs detailing the history of Hallettsville as a land grant community given by the widow of John Hallett, as the original mecca for youth rodeo competitions, and more. One sign, titled “The Hanging Tree,” nonchalantly tells the story of Pocket the Indian while commemorating a giant, crooked oak for its cruel past. In the official account, Pocket was a young, friendly, half-white Sioux who was turkey hunting with his British companion Leonard Hyde when he impulsively (some accounts blame “firewater” for this erratic behavior) shot the poor guy. After a year of trials and appeals, Pocket was sentenced to death by hanging, an event that allegedly gathered a crowd of about 3000 spectators. A smaller park on the other side of town houses a couple of unassuming monuments to local Confederate officers, another memorial that is easy to overlook but points to a checkered history.
The Christmas season is magical in Hallettsville, as the downtown transforms into a Hallmark scene for a few joyous weeks. Thousands of lights are strung from the spire of the clocktower down to every corner of the square, a magnificent scene accompanied by Christmas carols broadcast from on high. In addition to the traditional holiday window-dressing, businesses around the town center participated in a Christmas mural competition, won by a detailed realization of Ebenezer Scrooge’s moneylending office painted on the massive windows of People’s Bank. There are also several decorative dioramas that illustrate the Christian origins of holiday items like candy canes and the twelve days of Christmas. I found Christmas in Hallettsville to be as authentic and wholesome as anywhere, in no small part because the feared cliché of “taking Christ out of Christmas” seems to have not yet reached holiday celebrations here.
Like other places in rural America, Jesus Christ is eminently visible at the forefront of life year-round. While the town is home to congregations representing several denominations of Christianity – Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopal, Church of Christ, three varieties of Baptist, and a few nondenominational churches – the Catholic church is a dominant political and cultural force, dating from the original settlement of the area by Czech and Bavarian Catholics. Sacred Heart Catholic Church has a campus that occupies the area of several blocks, including a large 1960s-style sanctuary and a K-12 parochial school that once rivaled the public high school. I attended mass at Sacred Heart a few times, but I preferred visiting the famous European-style painted churches in the outlying hamlets of the countryside. These small churches, constructed board-by-board by the original settlers in the late 1800s, feature ornate, hand-carved altars along with beautiful biblical imagery painted on the walls and ceilings. These historic churches are kept alive by a rotation of mainly younger priests dispatched from Sacred Heart to revive the magic of the old-country mass at least for a couple hours each month (albeit with more creaks from the aging floors and congregants).
The German-Czech heritage is visible elsewhere too, not just in the names of businesses and surrounding villages (Moravia, Breslau, Vsetin, Praha, Henkhaus, Weimar, etc.) but also in the local cuisine. Besetsny’s Kountry Bakery, a local chain based in Schulenburg, has a popular outpost on the main drag in Hallettsville that sells kolaches and other baked goods along with homestyle diner food. Novosad’s barbecue joint only opens for a brief period on Fridays and Saturdays, but people line up out the door for the ribs and pork steaks prepared using traditional Czech recipes – they’re delicious, and worthy of the ‘Top 50 BBQ in Texas’ status proudly painted on the old plaster walls. Janak’s sausages are also famously tasty, competing with Maeker’s in Shiner and Hruska’s in Ellinger for the regional crown (I think Janak’s are the best, but I am admittedly biased). I went into Janak’s country store one day asking for kielbasa, since the seasoning in their raw pork sausages reminded my mom of the recipe she used to make with her Belarussian grandmother. The staff donned looks of complete confusion as I described the boiled kielbasa that I was craving…very few people buy their sausages unsmoked, and it had not occurred to these Texans that a sausage could be prepared in any way besides barbecue.
Across the road from Janak’s market is an odd landmark that I can’t omit from any account about Hallettsville. Numerous handmade signs point to the Pecan Grove Apparition Park, which contains a small hand-built shrine where you might find travelers who stopped to pray or reflect. As the story goes, the landowner had gotten his pickup truck stuck near the creek when a vision of the Virgin Mary appeared to speak to him. Magically, his truck became unstuck, and he proceeded to build this outdoor worship space by the highway in the hopes that people would learn about this miracle and feel closer to God. I don’t know what came first, the shrine to the Virgin Mary or the outdoor roller rink that has fallen into disrepair nearby, but the place is an interesting stop nonetheless.
When the entire state of Texas was hit by a devastating winter storm in February 2021, Hallettsville was blanketed by 3 inches of ice and snow for the first time in at least a decade. The town took on an entirely new character, silent without trucks or people, landmarks covered by the white stuff that was the only missing element from the Hallmark Christmas set. The courthouse stood over it all, its frozen clocktower resolute above the sea of white. I fared through the disaster just fine, never experiencing an electrical blackout because I lived across the street from the police and fire stations. But I heard horror stories from people living away from the town center: pipes freezing and breaking, homes dipping below 40 degrees, livestock suffering from hypothermia. I hope that the community stepped up to help those affected, though I don’t have any strong evidence for that. A few weeks before this calamity, my landlord Donna lost her battle with breast cancer, leaving Mark alone without the love of his life. Though Mark was a former teacher for the Hallettsville ISD and a weekly attendant at Sacred Heart, he didn’t exactly receive an outpouring of help, more an acknowledgment of thoughts and prayers. I felt deeply sorry for Mark, but fortunately he could lean on his family (and a sense of rugged individualism, which comes with the territory) for support.
Every few weeks, I would get my haircut from a barber whose small studio hangs off the back of the feed store. He had been working in the same shop for nearly 50 years, offering a standard haircut (you’d have to convince him if you wanted something else) for a bargain price. He told me several stories, most of which lamented the decline of Hallettsville since its apex in…the 70s, the 50s, or 20s, this was never clearly articulated. For my favorite of these stories, he had a prime view when PETA protested Glen’s Packing Company across the street: the townspeople had a grand time heckling the protesters, who fled when a young hog was released to run wild in the crowd. Glen’s is an unassailable fixture as the best place for locals to bring cattle for processing, and once I got past the outdoor chute where trailers of cows are unloaded for slaughter and the alternating smells of dead animals/manure/bleach, I began to understand its popularity. Glen’s Meat Market sells the most delicious steaks, any cut you might desire as long as it’s massive, never frozen but always fresh from the cow, meat so delectable that I would bake (I know, blasphemy!) a ~2 pound sirloin in its own juices with minimal seasoning and it would come out to a perfect tenderness every time. The store also sells other meats along with local sauces and seasoning blends, supplying the barbecue needs around Hallettsville all year long.
One Saturday morning, I went into Glen’s with Veronica when a skeleton crew of mostly family was manning the counter. The entire store fell quiet, leaving only the resonating thwack of a meat cleaver striking an age-old chopping block. Customers stared at Veronica, an outsider with cool hair and visible tattoos, and the clerk ignored her salutation and proceeded to serve me (even though I stood behind her). There are signs all over the store saying that they “reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” though I was surprised by the follow-through. Around the same time, I was getting a haircut when my barber looked at me sternly and said, “Big things are coming. The Lord will, with our help, reinstate the right people as leaders. And when it comes time [for Texas] to secede, you better know whose side you are on. ‘Cause if you’re on the wrong side…let’s just say a lot of people will be lined up and shot.” It was chilling, revolutionary talk that I had heard murmured before but never in such a specific, pointed manner. Though I would return to Glen’s periodically thereafter, needless to say I found another barber.
I don’t wish to characterize the people here as hostile to outsiders; I was greeted warmly with small talk by many strangers who genuinely wanted to know more about me. The number of times I was asked about my last name and whether I had any family in the area was staggering, too large to be counted using both hands and feet. But the people are definitely guarded, cautious when talking about themselves and wary of businesses owned by out-of-towners that have a history of promising big things then vanishing with unpaid debts. My friend Jen moved to Hallettsville over 20 years ago as a single mom and still feels like an outsider. She recounted when she tried to get her daughter, who was around 10 years old at the time, a membership to use the public pool during her summer vacation – they were put on a waiting list for over a year while some sort of unofficial vetting process undoubtedly took place. Beyond a ‘members only’ pool, the legacy of racial segregation still persists here 50 years later. Black residents make up about 10% of Hallettsville’s population, and the majority live south of where the railroad tracks used to bisect the town, near the public junior high school (which used to be the black high school when segregation was legal). Occasionally, someone I didn’t know very well would utter a derogatory remark to me in hushed tones, most commonly a criticism of how a black acquaintance behaved or a complaint about the preponderance of Mexican restaurants in town. The same nostalgia that makes Hallettsville’s small town vibe so one-of-a-kind also holds the community back, keeping people at arm’s length from one another under the veneer of Southern manners.
As spring arrived and the fields of wildflowers began to pop, I became extra busy at work: our building permits were approved, and I was coordinating work crews during the day as well as offering my recommendations for food, drink, and entertainment. My hands-down favorite restaurant in the town is Los Jarritos Taqueria, a traditional Mexican establishment that serves the most incredible pork al pastor on soft homemade flour tortillas (along with other specialties like barbacoa, lengua, carne asada con nopales, horchata, and aguas frescas). The best spot for drinks is Cabo San Lucas restaurant, where you can order their very dangerous margarita by the punchbowl-sized goblet. Entertainment was a little harder to come by for our work crews, since they wouldn’t be as interested in the Hallet Oak Gallery (a lovely art gallery on the square that features rotating exhibits of local artists and offers free art classes). Cole Theater shows a new movie on its single projector screen every couple of weeks, packing the house nightly for movies like Top Gun: Maverick and leaving me a whole row to stretch out while watching The Lost City. Hallettsville proper can be a little quiet, admittedly, but I find that there were a lot of things to do if you include my adventures farther afield.
Heading out of town on FM 957, you quickly arrive in the heart of the pastoral German-Czech countryside. A pair of wineries offer locally-produced wines in peaceful surrounds – Majek Vineyard with its open-barn pavilion, live music performances, and farm vistas; and Moravia Vineyard with its traditional craft wine cellar and better wines. The town of Shiner is synonymous with Spoetzl Brewery, where you can take a tour of the shiny new manufacturing space then unwind in the biergarten. Nearby Schulenburg lacks drinking options but has a small museum dedicated to the area’s polka bands, past and present. Further up the road are La Grange and Round Top, where interior designers and collectors of Americana flock to the antique furniture exchanges. The region is also central to Texas revolutionary history, as you can easily make a daytrip to Goliad, where Texans were massacred at the Spanish colonial fort (nowadays, the Presidio de la Bahia is as peaceful as it is historically interesting). The next skirmish occurred near Gonzales, a half hour detour from Hallettsville; this battle is famous for the Come-And-Take-It cannon, which is displayed prominently in the city museum. Between Gonzales and Goliad, Cuero houses a museum dedicated to Chisholm Trail history and a fascinating Frontier-era pharmacy, where an effusive docent described the array of antiquated powders, tonics, and medical devices (even bringing out a 100-year old fetus from the ‘secret collection’)… some off-the-beaten-path fun!
Hallettsville has a few festivals every year that bring the community together at the large KoC event center. Fiddle players and fans from across Texas come out every April for Fiddlers’ Frolics, a weekend-long festival headlined by a multigenerational, cross-genre fiddling contest. The Texas State Domino Competition is less spectator-friendly, but that’s not the point: the community gathers outside the hall mainly for epic barbecue competitions. During Fiddlers, my coworker Rodney competed against 140 other teams judged across 10 categories of barbecued meats. It’s a weekend long cookoff, with families and friends tailgating outside in the field of smokers – but it’s surprisingly hard to get any samples, as nearly every cut has already been claimed by judges or family. Even the Kolache Festival in the fall is less about kolaches (which were served room-temperature in plastic wrappers) than the barbecue. With a car show and craft fair tacked on, each citywide gathering was a rollicking good time, even if the headline reason for the gathering was often barely noticeable.
In May of this year, I was invited to my coworker Kevin’s wedding. Donning slacks and a blazer, I was severely overdressed for the ceremony at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Yoakum (the “Land of Leather” and of stonewashed jeans, apparently). After a low-key service in which the pastor repeatedly razzed my guy Kevin, the entire party proceeded to a dance hall outside of town, where Bud Light and barbecue flowed. After an extended dinner and social hour, everyone threw down for an evening of country dancing that shook the old wood floors and metal siding of the hall. It hardly mattered that I knew nobody and stuck out like a sore thumb; I had fun participating in a moment (mainly from the sidelines, but I was there!) of authentic celebration for Kevin and his new bride.
At some point during my second year in Hallettsville, the clock above the square was repaired! All four faces of the clocktower now tell the correct time, with bells chiming on the hour. And sure enough, the passage of time had brought several changes to Hallettsville during my relatively short stay. The bat colony across the street had been exterminated to make way for a comfy new Vietnamese nail salon in the old Ford dealership showroom. Hallettsville Seafood and Steak finally opened to much fanfare – finally, a restaurant that isn’t Mexican! (Sidebar: there were 3 such restaurants before, and now there are 5.) Next door, the even newer Vicenza’s Restaurant deserves the shine for some of the best Italian food I’ve eaten outside of the northeast. A trailer selling “BBQ/Menudo” was plopped into what looks like the beginnings of a food truck park. My company halted its construction before meeting the permit scope, but blending operations were allowed to commence anyway. Once the City had fired the fire marshal earlier this year, it no longer had any recourse for mandating inspections or enforcing code compliance, a return to the free-for-all building philosophy that individualists love until something weird gets erected next door.
With much less need for a facility design engineer, I amicably resigned from my company in July 2022, ending an employment term of exactly 2 years. After my last day of work, I wandered next door to Sammy’s Night Club, a windowless cinderblock building that usually appeared closed during the pandemic. There, a bunch of guys around my age gathered to play pool and drink beer, flocking from the oil field to the west and the large pipeline construction site to the east. I met Terri, the owner and bartender, who described her role as chaperone to these wild wildcatters of today; evidently, the area still has a huge problem with drunk driving, that’s why sensible people stay off the roads after about 9 pm. It’s a problem that’s not exclusive to young people, as a table of octogenarians played dominos in a corner and accumulated 5-6 empty pint glasses apiece. I made it safely back to the apartment, where I spent the weekend packing my belongings into a storage unit before moving away.
A few months after leaving Hallettsville, I returned to vote in this week’s elections. The town is, of course, much the same as when I left, save for a few more new businesses rotating in where others went out. I paid a visit to the Lavaca Historical Museum, where Ms. Janice took me through exhibits commemorating various histories of the area. It’s funny how in a place so seemingly frozen in time, the faded photos from 50 and 100 years ago portray people and places that seem so far removed from the present. The stark differences between generations were particularly evident when reading a long-form account from 1976 about Hallettsville, the author describes a completely different cast of characters who were even more connected with the traditions of the original settlers who built the community. I felt a sense of nostalgia, not because I loved living here or meshed with the community at all, but because I got to experience something that is rare in today’s world: a small town that not only preserved its history but continues to actively live it!
Worldly Observations 