Converging two stories

I know some of you guys visited us in Gruene many times when we were teenage hippies restoring the little gray house back in the 70′s. When you did, you probably met Bill Steagall – He was my buddy – an actual electrician and carpenter, an elderly 25 years old; I was the skinny, excitable 18 year old kid doing a half ass job of holding the other end of his tape measure. Of course I learned most from Uncle Raymond but I also learned a lot from Bill (who learned some himself from Uncle Raymond) and Bill made a huge contribution to our little house in Gruene and was a big part of that whole chapter.

I remember I’d go to the big salvage yard out by Kelly Air Force Base and come back with weird doors and odd sinks and enormous six foot army barracks windows and he’d say there just wasn’t any way this stuff was going to fit. Jimmie and I would give him the sad puppy eyes and he’d find a way. Cut a bigger hole. He talked me out of some of the stupid stuff and talked me into a lot of the right stuff. He’s just a great person.

Then, flip to this other story: some of you know Dave McDermott. Becky and Tom knew him. They knew Chip Kauffman who was Dave’s buddy who was a big kayaker like them. Chip was involved in us getting into the Gruene deal. He also sold and then tried to take the Gruene water tower down when he ran out of money and we ended up in that big lawsuit against him. If you wanna know who won all you have to do is check and make sure the tower is still there. Look for the dent on the side of the cap, that was where the crane had hold of it.

Dave is famous around here because he was the first guy to make a thriving business out of renting canoes, rafts and tubes on the Guadalupe at his Whitewater River Sports up by Canyon Lake. (Whitewater Amphitheater is there now). Before Dave going down the river wasn’t a wild party deal, it was a quite nature deal. Other than that… Dave was a great guy.

Jimmie’s first big art for hire project was designing Dave’s Gruene River Company logo when he moved from the lake to Gruene and it was a big deal – it was on the first t-shirts ever sold in Gruene (the first of ten million) and billboards and posters and pamphlets for years. Granddad was so proud of her, it was like his greyhound bus logo on a micro scale. I’m serious, you couldn’t turn around in New Braunfels or Gruene without seeing it; it made Jimmie one of the more famous artists in our little “art community” world. So I was first friends with Dave through Uncle Raymond but then we were VIPs with him because Jimmie did his highly success logo and because I worked for him on weekends. I used to leave Bill Steagall working on our little house to go guide river raft trips for McDermott at $10 each to make the money to pay Bill his carpenter’s salary at the end of the day. Hippie economy. I loved guiding. It wasn’t crowded back then and it was like we were in charge of the river. You stack all of this stuff together and those were some of the best days ever.

Sometimes us three or four water logged guides and a couple of new age Gruene project owners and their shaggy carpenters and the cooler of who ever came down the river that day would end up at this soulful old two story house that Dave rented from two old sisters. It was like a secret spot. We wouldn’t drive up, we’d pull up in a raft. We’d make a campfire on the bank and play guitars in the moonlight and drink the first batches of Guadalupe Valley Wine out of goat skin bota bags – we had a never ending supply of it because it came out of huge vats at the Winery right next to our house. You just had to drink for a while then stop and pick the grape peel from between your teeth. This old house was one of the first built on the river. The sisters’ family owned a lot of river in the 1800′s just like H.D. Gruene did. It’s old – Indians lived on the banks when this house was built. It always felt to me like Tom Sawyer could walk out onto the porch any minute. As a matter of fact, McDermott had these wild Indian looking young sons who ran up and down the river all day and lived like Huckleberry Finn.

Everybody loved that house and everybody was welcome – it was a dreamy, cool, hill country Texas cosmic cowboy deal. I’m so glad to have these great memories of that spot on the river and that historic old house.

OK. Back to my buddy Bill and connecting the dots. Several years later – after we’d all grown up a little bit – Jimmie and I had Casey and Bill Steagall had a daughter – both born on the 4th of July. When the girls were young we had this second chapter in our friendship and celebrated their birthday’s together up at Granny’s house on the hill for several years. Granny LOVED that, she adored Casey – we’d all watch the fireworks over the Comal River as a big family. That chapter ended when Steagall moved to Houston and we lost touch with each other for many years.

That all sets the backstory and brings us to this week…. we were pleasantly surprised to get an invitation to a July 4th fireworks party. From none other than Mr. Bill Steagall. I didn’t even know that he was back in town but I do know Bill really well and I know fireworks and I know they are excellent when experienced together. Historically, he is the anti-fire Marshall. So, earlier tonight Jimmie and I grabbed the address and started driving over to surprise old Bill.

So…. the address is Preiss Heights, it’s off the beaten path and we rarely have reason to go there but we know exactly where it is. It’s basically two long roads connected at the end into a horseshoe shape. As we’re driving I began thinking about Dave’s old river hideout, it was nearby. That started me thinking of the long story above, thinking of that house started parts of this and that coming. No particular reason but I’m driving kinda dreamy and feeling nostalgic about rafting and the early Gruene days. Thinking about funny Steagall stories. It kept getting stronger and then the old time feelin’ got particularly strong as we turned in at the address and found ourselves starring through the windshield at Dave’s old Huckleberry Finn cabin. The street and the drive were dark and we really didn’t know where we were until we had pulled all the way in and the house was all lit up. It was like driving into yesteryear. Jimmie and I did that funny thing where you turn and look at each other really slowly – how did we get here – did we turn left at 1975? Our jaws were in our laps – we were trying wrap our minds around the fact that three decades later, after all of this moving here and there, Steagall somehow ends up reclaiming Dave’s old hippie house. Gotta love those magic full circle things where you get reconnected with where you started. Seeing Bill after a bunch of years, comparing gray beards and walking into a house we loved in our youth made us feel young. Bill and Linda told us the story on how they ended up there and it involves even more coincidences involving other old friends. What a tiny, tiny, tiny, small world. Taylor and Evan were trying to grasp what in the hell we were talking about – it was like they were getting exposed to the Middle Ages that happened before they were born.

Tonight was awesome. This place has a huge yard that gradually slopes down to a gorgeous spot on the river- Bill says to tell everybody that we’re welcome out there for parties whenever he has them. Bill floated what looked like several hundred dollars worth of fireworks out in a canoe and as they exploded they reflected on the water and echoed against the cliffs. We were swimming in our old swimming hole, it was great. We had no idea what was going to happen tonight. Magic happens most often when you least expect it.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 3rd, 2006 at 11:24 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.