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The old country: few places on earth manage to stay the same. Why should a wrinkled piece of Texas receive exemption? But I''m grateful that I came to know the hill country before it was overrun.

Article Excerpt
>> During most of my life I have cherished the Hill Country, as have large numbers of my fellow Texans. It is a swath of rumpled terrain whose eastern and southern edge sweeps in an arc some two hundred miles long from the Austin area down past San Antonio and west to not far from Del Rio, on the Mexican border. This curving boundary is a rise of hundreds of feet from lower, flatter lands to the east and south and is known as the Balcones Escarpment or Fault Line, the result of an upheaval in Tertiary times. Here prairies end against heights dark with juniper and oak, the valleys between them watered by cypress-shaded rivers and creeks, the escarpment itself spouting forth great springs here and there from its cavernous aquifer. Containing all or parts of more than twenty counties, the hills have a less emphatic border on their northwestern inward side, where valleys and draws grow shallow and blend into the ranching grasslands of the wide, semiarid Edwards Plateau, of which the Hill Country itself is the eroded fringe. [paragraph] Since well over a century ago, the region has been a sort of reference point for natives of other parts of the state, and mention of it usually brings smiles and nods. Not much of it is spectacular in the manner of high mountains and craggy seacoasts and such places, but we care about it-the dissected, elevated landscapes unlike the areas where most of us live, the un-Texan cool spring-fed streams, the fishing and hunting if we're inclined that way, the people and their towns and farms and ranches and their rather distinctive history. [paragraph] In earlier times, farm families from flatter and more fertile lands within reach, sometimes two or three families in a group, would trek to the hills in wagons during the summer, after crops needed no more care and had been laid by fill harvest. The hill breezes were dry and healthful, the peaches and plums and melons ripe on nearby friendly farms, the bass and catfish and perch active in clear streams beside which these folks would set up camp under great pecans and oaks, staying for a week or two to fish and loaf and talk and cook and eat and swim. When young, I knew old men and women who as children had regularly gone along on such expeditions, and their recollections were idyllic. As a youngster in the twenties and thirties, I saw the region on trips south from Fort Worth with my family, and later, when I was in college, groups of us, with our girls and (in those days) a faculty chaperon and his wife, would go there to sun and swim for long weekends at a "camp"...

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